Psy might not be the first person you think of when we tell you to name the first internet badass that comes to mind. But consider this: The Korean pop star and his hit "Gangnam Style" have literally broken YouTube. The video playing site acknowledged this week (via NME) that it was forced to rework its programming to continue counting the number of hits the music video for "Gangnam" has received.
In short, as the software folks at YouTube continued to develop the site, they set the maximum viewing threshold at the 32-bit integer mark, meaning they didn't foresee any video ever getting more than 2,147,483,647 views. We imagine that had we invented a site for showing videos prior to the era of viral media, we would also assume logically that no video could ever get more than 2 billion views.
"We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer, but that was before we met Psy," said a spokesperson for the site. "'Gangnam Style' has been viewed so many times we have to upgrade! Hover over the counter in Psy's video to see a little math magic and stay tuned for bigger and bigger numbers on YouTube."
Is anything else close to breaking that limit? No. Hardly. The no. 2 most viewed video in YouTube history is Justin Bieber's "Baby" music video, which has just barely more than half of the views for "Gangnam Style." YouTube's views are dominated by music videos as a whole, with 29 of the site's 30 most-viewed items being music vids (the exception: "Charlie bit my finger!")
