I honestly don’t know how I feel about this. Inescapable ear burner of 2012 Gangnam Style, whose tune you are now incapable of removing from your head, spawned something of a cultural phenomenon when it quickly smashed just about every viewing record that YouTube was capable of.
Not content to simply rest on its laurels as a champion within a framework, the song has since morphed into some sort of hyper-evolving beast, now hell-bent on consuming the very framework that birthed it in the first place. Or, to put it another way, Psy‘s mega hit has now legitimately broken YouTube itself.
You see, Gangnam Style has now been viewed so many times that it’s exceeded what YouTube’s view counter code is capable of handling.
In technical terms, YouTube operated its counter mechanism via a 32-bit integer, which has a maximum limit of 2,147,483,647. The programmers were all well aware of this limitation, but were all fairly sure that no single video would ever get anywhere near that number of views. Unfortunately for them, nobody told this to Psy, who looked at that limitation and saw it for the empty threat that it truly was.
So when it passed 2 billion views back in May, YouTube – quite obviously – prepared for the looming day that it’d fuck their 32-bit shit right up. That day has finally come. And YouTube being the fun-loving jokesters that they are, decided to have a little fun with it.
Visiting the video on YouTube and hovering your mouse over the view counter now yields a bit of mathematical screwballery.
Clearly a glitch in the matrix if there ever were one.
YouTube has since applied a new 64-bit integer to the Gangnam Style view counter, meaning the new limitation is a casual 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 views, which some estimates suggest will be reached in about 4 billion years’ time.
And just in case you’ve read through to this point and somehow managed to remove the tune from your brain in the process, here’s this.
Don’t say we never do anything for you.
GIF via Mashable.
