I’m sure many of us are familiar with Gangnam Style, the music video from South Korean singer PSY that took the world by storm when it was released back in 2012. While the video has finally fallen out of the public eye, millions of people continue to watch it on a daily basis, which is why it’s far and away the most watched video on YouTube. So many people have watched it, in fact, that the video broke YouTube’s view counter.
“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,” said YouTube on its official Google+ page. “Gangnam Style has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade to a 64-bit integer (9,223,372,036,854,775,808)! Hover over the counter in PSY’s video to see a little math magic and stay tuned for bigger and bigger numbers on YouTube.”
Essentially what happened was that the video reached the maximum number that can be held by a 32-bit integer slot, which is 2,147,483,647. YouTube’s developers just never expected a video to achieve that many views. Fortunately, by upgrading its view counter to a 64-bit integer, YouTube won’t have another issue like this until a video reaches 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 views, according to The Los Angeles Times, so it might be a while.
YouTube’s developers noticed that the video would reach the magic number a few months ago and prepared the necessary tweaks to prevent any issue, according to The Wall Street Journal, so YouTube never actually broke. Had they not implemented the tweaks, however, the number below the video that indicated how many views it had would’ve remained static, although the actual number of views would still be recorded at a separate location.
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