YouTube's view counter wasn't ready for 'Gangnam Style'
In 2012, South Korean singer PSY took the world by storm with his "Gangnam Style" music video, which eventually turned into a super, mega hit and an overall internet sensation. Along the way, the video also became the first one ever to get to 1 billion views on YouTube, a number that hasn't stopped growing since being reached. Speaking of which, the Google-owned service revealed that "Gangnam Style" pushed the original view counter to its limits, so much so that it stopped counting at one point. "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," YouTube stated in a blog post.
Additionally, because of how many times PSY's video has been watched, YouTube says it had to upgrade its view counter to a 64-bit integer (9,223,372,036,854,775,808) -- so it looks like it'll be a while before another video is popular enough to "break" things. In the meantime, and for the sake of fun, hovering your desktop clicker over the "Gangnam Style" counter on YouTube's site will make it show a bunch of random digits.
[Image credit: Associated Press]
