YouTube wasn’t ready for ‘Gangnam Style,’ but now it’s ready for anything

YouTube wasn’t ready for ‘Gangnam Style,’ but now it’s ready for anything

Korean singer PSY's hit received over 2.5 billion views.

Records viewers don’t even know about are being smashed every day. Gangnam Style, the catchy song with a surreal but mesmerizing video from Korean singer PSY, has broken the YouTube view counter.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, shared a post on Monday December 1 that read, “We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer…but then we met PSY.” A 32-bit integer, which was the mathematical unit used to represent data on YouTube for years, limited the number of countable views to 2, 147, 483, 647, ie, 2 billion. Gangnam Style, however, has surpassed that seemingly unfathomable number.

BBC News reports that Google engineers saw the number approaching and prepared a new updated system to handle the numbers. YouTube’s counters now use a 64-bit integer, which will allow it to count up to the rather unheard-of quintillions. To be precise, Gangnam Style will have to receive 9, 223, 372, 036, 854,775, 808 views to repeat its feat and require a new integer and counter.

The next highest-viewed video, Justin Bieber’s song Baby, is easily a billion views behind Gangnam Style.

PSY’s creative team shared the news on his social media page but he has yet to comment specifically on the occasion.

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