Psy’s Gangnam Style, the first YouTube video to ever pass 1 billion views – as well as becoming the first to ever pass 2 billion views – broke YouTube. Well, their view counter, anyway…
YouTube’s hit counter was programmed using a 32-bit integer, YouTube explained on Google+ this week, as the service never imagined a single video racking up more than the 2,147,483,647 views that the code maxes out at. Then Psy happened.
The counter stalled when the number of views hit the magic 2,147,483,647 count, but the YouTube programming drones did some behind the scenes magic to put a fix in place, so Gangnam Style is once more racking up the view numbers it so richly deserves.
As a “tribute” to the video’s counter breaking abilities the developers added an easter egg to the counter. Hover your cursor over the counter, and the counter will “freak out,” (Gangnam style? -Ed.), before displaying a negative number which links to the Google+ post.
OK, Gangnam Stylers it’s clear you should have one goal, and ONLY one goal in life – Break the YourTube video counter again. It’ll only take a mere 9,223,372,036,854,775,809 total views to break it.
