Gangnam Style fell out of the public eye a while ago (thankfully), but people haven’t stopped watching it. It’s been seen so many times that it actually broke YouTube’s view counter, in the nerdiest possible way by busting the code behind the scenes.
As the YouTube Google+ page explains, the video stalled out at 2,147,483,647 views, the maximum number that can be held by a 32-bit integer slot. YouTube’s developers just never expected something to get that high, just like the programmers who wrote Y2K vulnerable code never thought they’d have to worry about the year 2000.
As of now, Gangnam Style’s count looks to be heading ever upward, so it seems YouTube has fixed the problem and gotten ready for every higher view counts. But it still leaves the important questions of who the hell is still watching Gangnam Style and why? [Google+ via FactMag]