Believe it or not, people around the world are still watching Gangnam Style, that supremely silly yet insanely catchy ditty by South Korean pop star PSY. In fact, so many people have been hitting YouTube to check out the siteโs most watched video that theyโve gone and broken the view counter. The technology powering YouTubeโs counter meant that it could only handle a maximum figure of just over 2.1 billion. Although a simple solution wouldโve been to simply replace the digits with the word โlots,โ or โtoo manyโ or even โwhy are you still watching this?โ, the YouTube team instead decided to get the toolkit out and have a tinker.
Long after becoming the first YouTube video to surpass 1 billion views, and mere months after becoming the first video to crack the 2 billion view barrier, Psyโs Gangnam Style has officially become the first video to break YouTube. Well, YouTubeโs hit counter, at least. YouTubeโs 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 count stalled out when it hit that magic number, but fear not: YouTubeโs code elves got to work and a fix already appears to be in place, as the videoโs views currently stand at 2,152,419,883 (whew!) and counting. Google didnโt explain how it fixed the issue, but it did leave a small Easter Egg hidden in the 32-bit integerโs wake; hover your cursor over Gangnam Styleโs counter and itโll start freaking out, before finally settling on a negative number and linking to the Google+ post.