A strike is a formal penalty point for a policy violation, counted toward termination. YouTube runs the famous version: one warning, then strikes that freeze privileges, and three strikes inside 90 days ends the channel. Strikes make enforcement countable: you know the score, and the score expires.
Strikes come from CONTENT: violations of the community guidelines as classifiers and reviewers read them. Metric activity lives in different enforcement lanes (spam systems, rate limits).
So strike anxiety about buying views is mostly misplaced, while strike risk about edgy uploads is not. Know which lane your risk actually lives in.
A striking channel is also a demoted one in practice, and frozen upload weeks cost momentum the count doesn't show. For monetised channels the chilling effect on Partner status outweighs the freezes.
The plays: appeal strikes you genuinely dispute, fix the content pattern behind ones you don't, and mind the 90-day window before returning to the boundary.
A strike ages off the termination count 90 days after issue. The freezes it caused are shorter; the count is what matters at three.
Active strikes freeze privileges and weigh on reviews. A channel in the strike cycle is a channel the Partner Programme looks at harder.
Separate systems, both counted in threes. Copyright strikes have their own cures: retraction, counter-notice, expiry.
Every definition lives in the full glossary, and the services behind the vocabulary are on the services page.