Remember “Gangnam Style,” the 2012 earworm by Korean pop star PSY with the amazing music video you couldn’t stop watching? Well, it just broke YouTube. Literally.
“Gangnam Style” accumulated so many YouTube views that the website could no longer display the exact number. Why? YouTube’s original counter was 32-bit, meaning that the largest number it could handle was 2,147,483,647. Once total views of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” exceeded that amount, YouTube’s counter went a little bonkers. Long story short, when YouTube was first designed, its architects never thought a single video would garner more than 2.147 billion views.
Here’s what the YouTube team wrote about the incident on YouTube’s Google+ page:
We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (=2,147,483,647 views), but that was before we met PSY. “Gangnam Style” has been viewed so many times we have to upgrade!
Hover over the counter in PSY’s video to see a little math magic and stay tuned for bigger and bigger numbers on YouTube.
In the 872 days since it was first uploaded to YouTube on July 15, 2012, PSY’s smash hit has received an average of nearly 2.5 million views per day. With numbers like that, it’s kind of amazing that it took this long to break YouTube.
And for those who can’t resist watching the video just one more time, here you go:
