Bizzare Facts

In the history of viral content, few moments are as consequential as the run of **PSY's 'Gangnam Style.'** In **December 2012**, the South Korean megahit became the first video in history to reach **one billion views** on YouTube. The milestone was monumental not just for the artist, but for the entire platform, which had taken seven years to hit its first billion-view video.

The video's unprecedented popularity caused an amusing, yet technically serious, problem for Google. YouTube's view counter system at the time was running on a 32-bit integer system, which meant the absolute maximum number of views it could count was **2,147,483,647**. As 'Gangnam Style' approached this limit, engineers realized the counter would effectively break and reset if it went any higher.

Google was forced to make an emergency upgrade to a 64-bit integer system—a monumental, background task—to ensure the views could continue to be tracked correctly. This event remains a hilarious technological footnote, proving that the phenomenon of 'going viral' can sometimes be so explosive it breaks the very software designed to measure it.