World history can basically be split into two periods: Before "Gangnam Style" and After "Gangnam Style."
Ah, yes. Remember that 2012 colossal hit from Korean hip-hop star Psy that went viral and changed your life forever? It's back with a vengeance.
"Gangnam Style," which has garnered more views than any other video on YouTube, has officially broken the Internet. OK, not really, but it did kind of break YouTube. The video for "Gangnam Style" now has more than 2.15 billion views on YouTube, which is seemingly a volume too great for the video streaming platform to handle.
"We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (=2,147,483,647 views)," YouTube wrote in a post on Google+ on Dec. 1. "'Gangnam Style' has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade to a 64-bit integer (9,223,372,036,854,775,808)!"
What all of this means is that YouTube's views counter could only reach a maximum value of 2,147,483,647. As "Gangnam Style" continued to rack up views, YouTube's engineers saw the problem approaching and switched to a 64-bit integer system that now allows the counter to reach a much higher number, as described in YouTube's post on Google+. If you head over to the music video on YouTube and hover over the views counter, you'll see it quickly turn into an animation that shows the fancy calculations at work.
"People still play this video an absurd number of times," Google spokesperson Matt McLernon told CNN. He also said "Gangnam Style" was the fifth most-played song of this past summer. Believe it or not, the video reportedly gains an average of three million new views per day.
Can I just ask the question that we're all thinking? Who is still watching "Gangnam Style"? There's no denying that this song was huge when it first debuted in 2012. But viral videos usually have a shelf life, and I thought this song would be well passed it by now. Apparently, that's not the case.
Way to make "Gangnam Style" relevant again, YouTube. This news will surely inspire many people to revisit this little gem, earning it even more views. You know you're just dying to break out into the video's iconic horse dance and chant "Heeeeeeeeey, sexy lady" for old time's sake.
