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When in doubt, reboot!

Not exactly an earth-shaking discovery, I know. Indeed, it’s something I regularly advise users who run into problems on their desktop or laptop computers to do. More recently, I have been offering the same advice for users of tablets and smart phones.

I had another reminder of that today.

For the past few days — or maybe a week or so; I have a terrible sense of time — my iPhone 5s has been refusing to play most videos on Facebook, or YouTube, or other sites. I put it down to atmospherics or perhaps a weak Wi-Fi signal but the problem seemed to getting worse, to the point where it was no longer playing ANY videos anywhere.

My second mantra when it comes to puzzling technological issues is “When in doubt, Google it!”

Today, I finally did that…

The first item listed on Google was a thread at Apple’s support forums:5s won’t play videos with iOS 8 | Apple Support Communities.

The response from Allen A. was:

It may help to force close all open applications and reset your iPhone.

iOS: Understanding multitasking

iPhone, iPad, iPod touch: Turning off and on (restarting) and resetting

A D’oh! moment to be sure.

And it worked. Immediately. Perfectly. 😳