Just how big a hit was Gangnam Style? So
mammoth that the Internet literally wasn't ready to
handle it. YouTube said that the 2012 song by South Korea's Psy - accompanied by a horse-riding-like dance
that became a global sensation - this week
reached the maximum number of views that its
counter had imagined to be conceivable. The video-sharing site shows that the official
version of the video has had more than 2.15 billion views - the equivalent of one-third of the world's population, although of course many people
watched more than once. The problem: YouTube designed its counter with
what is known in computer science as a 32-bit
integer, meaning that the maximum number of
countable views was 2,147,483,647. "We never thought a video would be watched in
numbers greater than a 32-bit integer," YouTube,
which is owned by search engine giant Google, said in a posting on Google+. YouTube engineers anticipated the problem and
upgraded to a 64-bit integer. That means that
"Gangnam Style" or future mega-hit videos can now go beyond nine sextillion views a feat that, at
least according to conventional wisdom, would be
impossible to break.

Hmmm