Google has revealed that the massively popular Gangnam Style music video from Psy has broken YouTube.
The 2012 pop sensation has been viewed so many times on the Google-owned video service that its counter couldn’t initially cope with the figure.
There’s a simple scientific reason for this. When Psy’s infectious ditty exceeded 2,147,483,647 views, it exceeded the 32-bit integer used in the counter.
“We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer,” wrote Google in a post on the matter.
Gangnam Style became the first ever YouTube video to bust through the 2 billion views figure earlier in the year.
As TechCrunch points out, this is actually a similar issue to the one infamously faced by the original Pac-Man arcade game in the ’80s. When particularly skilled users got to level 256, it exceeded the game’s 8-bit level counter (8-bit being restricted to 255) and made things go a bit glitchy and crazy.
Google’s solution to its own, more advanced issue? Why, to move to a 64-bit integer, of course.
“Gangnam Style” has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade to a 64-bit integer (9,223,372,036,854,775,808)!” the company writes.
So, who will be the YouTube celebrity to bust through that particularly meaty figure, then? Our money is on some kind of dancing animal.
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