Well, not the whole Internet, but just YouTube’s code: the South Korean K-Pop star’s Gangnam Style has become the one most viewed video on YouTube when it reached 2,147,483,647 (that’s two billion one hundred and forty seven million four hundred eighty three thousand six hundred and forty seven) views on the video sharing portal. This was the highest ever number YouTube’s counter could count.
For those without advanced computer knowledge, 2,147,483,647 (7FFF-FFFF in hexadecimal) is the highest possible value for a 32-bit signed binary integer in a variety of programming languages, meaning that this number is also the highest possible score a player can reach in some video games, for example. When YouTube was built, its creators did not expect a video to have such a high count of views. The incredible popularity of Gangnam Style (which I personally hate, by the way) is now forcing YouTube to upgrade. The engineers behind the video sharing service have changed the counter to a 64-bit one, capable of registering up to 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (9.2 quintillion) views.
Psy’s Gangnam Style was the most viewed video on YouTube in 2012, officially breaking the “Bieber Fever” and smashing all possible view records. The controversial wonder boy held a record of just under 804 million views of YouTube until the new phenomenon emerged from the remote South Korea to forcefully take over the “King of YouTube” title. Gangnam Style has even made it to the Guinness Book of Records, as the “most liked YouTube video ever”. The crazy dance style showed by Psy (Park Jae Sang is his birth name) was both made fun of and made tribute to online, triggering a huge wave of imitators from the marching band of the Ohio University to a bunch of Filipino inmates. The video’s counter on YouTube now stands at 2,155,509,713 – and who knows where it will stop…