PSY's 'Gangnam Style' video has been watched so many times, it broke YouTube's view counter

Wrap your head around this — PSY’s 'Gangnam Style' video has been viewed so many times that it’s equivalent to over 17,000 years of continuous play time.

Putting it a little differently, if you were born in the Upper Palaeolithic Era and this video started playing, it would still be playing in the present day. That’s a heck of a lot of play time. So much so, that this video is the first to have broken YouTube’s view counter.

How did this happen you ask? It’s to do with the way YouTube stores its view counter — until now, they used to use a 32-bit integer, which can accommodate a number (only) as large as 2,147,483,647. Exceed that, and the system breaks. Which is precisely what happened when the psychedelic video in question broke that barrier a few days ago. So much so that it required YouTube to upgrade the code that powers this counter, which they have now done to accommodate a 64-bit integer value.

Sure, it can now support videos that have about 9 quintillion views, which should more than suffice. Until the next upgraded PSY comes along.

Here’s YouTube’s response on the subject, in all its geeky glory: