Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ finally broke YouTube!

Long after becoming the first YouTube video to surpass 1 billion views, and months after becoming the first video to crack the 2 billion view barrier, Psy’s Gangnam Style has officially become the first video to break YouTube.

Well, YouTube’s hit counter, at least.

YouTube’s hit counter was programmed using a 32-bit integer, YouTube explained on Google+ this week, as the service never imagined a single video racking up more than the 2,147,483,647 views that the code maxes out at. Then Psy happened.

The count stalled out when it hit that magic number, but fear not: YouTube’s code elves got to work and a fix already appears to be in place, as the video’s views currently stand at 2,152,512,194 (whew!) and counting. Google didn’t explain how it fixed the issue, but it did leave a small Easter Egg hidden in the 32-bit integer’s wake; hover your cursor over Gangnam Style’s counter and it’ll start freaking out, before finally settling on a negative number and linking to the Google+ post.

But the best part of the ordeal? You’ve got an excuse to watch Psy do that hypnotically hilarious dance yet again (and again… and again…).

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PSY’s Gangnam Style becomes the first video to reach 1 billion YouTube views!

Hey, sexy ladies (and gentlemen).

Unless you have been living under a rock, the chances are you have either listened, danced or watched a rendition of the Kpop sensation that isPSY’s Gangnam Style.

It’s broken a number of records — overtaking Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ to become the most popular YouTube video of all time — but today it marks another impressive YouTube milestone: the first video to reach one billion views on YouTube.

(Note the dancing GIF on the YouTube page).

The video has topped nearly every viral list it has been part of, becoming Google’s top trending video in its YouTube Rewind retrospective for 2012, leading the most-saved videos on Pocket and even saw Google Chairman Eric Schmidt performing the iconic dance.

Of the billion views, over a third of them originated from a mobile device (over 340 million), while Facebook contributed 45 million via links and YouTube embeds. There’s been over 4 million comments posted, more than 6 million likes (435,000 dislikes) and it has been favorited roughly 1.8 million times.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of views come from those between the ages of 13 and 17, followed by guys aged between 35 and 44 years – we’ll go ahead and assume they came during work hours.

What’s next for PSY? Who knows, maybe 2 billion YouTube views. Or he’ll retire, he must be sick of performing the song and the dance wherever he goes.