This was just dropped in Mastodon:
And consequently FreeTube:
Error: Can’t load the video on this Invidious instance. YouTube is currently trying to block Invidious instances. Click here for more info about the issue.
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Hmm interesting. I’m able to access YT via Freetube with an active invidious instance.
Are you sure you don’t have fallback support enabled and it is directly accessing youtube?
Good question, but no. I’ve done multiple random searches (for things I’ve never searched for previously) to ensure nothing cached is being shown.
That Invidious instance you are pointing to doesn’t work.
What do you have under “Player Settings”
Hmm, interesting.
Edit: Okay, interesting. I can search YT but playback is unavailable. I’d not tried playing anything directly related to my comments above, it was only searching.
Edit 2: Another interesting thing is that via invidious, all video dates are set to 31 Dec 1969 (at least for me).
It is probably because you are using invidious proxying probably. That overrides your API settings.
I am not sure exactly what that does but I think it uses the invidious server as a proxy to youtube instead of actually using invidious to play the video.
I found that option to be pretty unreliable so I stopped using it. Partially because I didn’t understand exactly what it was doing.
Are you referring to the fact I can search but not play anything?
Oh, I didn’t see that edit to your post. Yeah, that is normal. The invidious instances can still support searching. You can’t play anything though.
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Yes, searching and refreshing my subscriptions work but trying to play anything will error out with the error message I posted in the op.
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No problem. Admittedly, I don’t know much about invidious, despite using it for years. 
I’ve been having some issues for the last day or two (I use inv.tux.pizza). PlasmaTube forgot my settings, but after reloading it’s actually playing videos (though still not showing information like title/description/etc)
mean mean meanie mean
not nice goolag people
… … …
gripped commented 3 hours ago
Using mpv to play the invidious links still works for me.
techmetx11 commented 29 minutes ago
I didn’t know this was an issue, I made a workaround PR that makes invidious use the HTML5 client if the Android client fails #4549
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Some public instances seem to be up again.
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