'Gangnam Style' So Popular it Broke YouTube

The "Gangnam Style" music video is so popular, it broke YouTube.

The video from South Korean singer PSY has surpassed YouTube's view limit, requiring the site to upgrade its counter. In a Google+ post this week, YouTube said it never expected a video to be quite so popular.

The system wasn't prepared when the video topped 2,147,483,647 views, the counter's limit. After it reached that insane amount, the counter stopped working.

"We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer, but that was before we met PSY," the post reads. "'Gangnam Style' has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade to a 64-bit integer."

With the upgrade, YouTube can now handle an unfathomable 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 views. To put it another way, that's more than nine quintillion.

This isn't the first YouTube record for Gangnam Style. Back in June, it became the first video to reach two billion views and before that it was the first to achieve a billion, just six months after first surfacing on YouTube. It was also named the top trending video in 2012.

:story: PC Magazine