Gangnam Style exceeds YouTube’s view limit prompting counter upgrade

Psy’s Gangnam Style exceeded YouTube’s view limit, prompting the site to upgrade its counter.

YouTube said the video – its most watched ever – has been viewed more than 2,147,483,647 times.

It has now changed the maximum view limit to 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or more than nine quintillion.

Gangnam Style became a worldwide hit when it was released in 2012, largely due to the surreal video.

YouTube’s counter previously used a 32-bit integer, which is a unit used to represent data in computer architecture. This means the maximum possible views it could count was 2,147,483,647.

On December 1, it posted a statement saying: “We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer… but that was before we met Psy.”

Google, which owns YouTube, later told website The Verge that engineers “saw this coming a couple months ago and updated our systems to prepare for it”.

YouTube now uses a 64-bit integer for its video counter, which means videos have a maximum viewer count of 9.22 quintillion.

Psy has yet to comment although news of YouTube’s change was posted on his Facebook and Twitter pages.

The second most-watched video on YouTube – Baby by Justin Bieber – lags behind Gangnam Style by more than a billion views.

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