Gangnam Style record view count broke YouTube, kind of

The South Korean pop prodigy PSY can easily be crowned as one of the most viral sensations to ever explode online. The appeal of the singer’s unique art style and quirky performances seems to be so absolutely universal that it transcends cultural, age and language barriers worldwide.

This astonishing success story would, arguably, never be possible without the existence of YouTube as the amazing melting pot of social and cultural influences and trends that it has become. The music video has consistently been breaking new viral grounds and is currently the most watched online video ever with over 2 billion unique visits and counting.

This is such an astonishing number, that it appears even the people behind YouTube never thought is possible as recently Gangnam Style managed to “break” the view counter (as pictured).

The more technical explanation of the problem is that apparently YouTube designers used a 32-bit signed Integer variable to store the view count of videos that has a maximum value of 2,147,483,647, which PSY indisputably proved is simply not enough to handle the long-lasting viral storm.

The issue was quickly addressed by YouTube, but users managed to catch a glimpse of the rather interesting and quite literally negative consequences. Google also stated that to fix the issue they are switching the counter variable to a 64-bit Integer and left a funny reminder on the clip`s view counter. This for the time being is a pretty good remedy.

All we can do now is wait around for the next sensational video, which will be able break the new rather cosmological 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 limit.

Source | Via