Discord’s new YouTube video got 1.4 billion views in 24 hours. What’s up with that?

For this year’s April Fools’ Day, Discord accidentally broke YouTube.

At least, that seems to be what happened.

For the 2024 edition of its annual funny ha-ha prank, the chat platform uploaded a 17-second video to YouTube where it advertised that it was totally adding loot boxes, and all users had to do to get in on this very real gamba fun was follow a link. People who followed that link were given clown icons, and Discord later changed the video’s description to “Why would we ever bring Loot Boxes into a chat app.”

This is all well and good.

What wasn’t well and good was the video’s view count.

Within a couple hours of being uploaded, it had racked up tens of millions of views. By the evening of April 1, it was at hundreds of millions, and had broken YouTube’s 24-hour viewership record (previously held by MrBeast and then the GTA 6 trailer) By the morning of April 2, it was at over 1 billion views, and was #1 on Trending.

So what was the deal? Did people just dig Discord’s joke that much?

Probably not. According to YouTuber The Horizon, when Discord posted its prank video and linked said video back to its platform so people could claim their clown icons, something went wrong somewhere in the code. What resulted was a situation where the video looped in the background of every single active Discord user’s session over and over and over and over, from the moment it was posted. Software developer Marvit Witt

concurred, alleging that one of Discord’s “high up developers” was confused by the staggering view count and wanted to know “how the fuck” it was happening.

We reached out to both YouTube and Discord, trying to confirm if this is what happened. Neither company responded to requests for information. But, given the public information we do have, it seems likely that The Horizon’s theory is correct, and Discord accidentally viewbotted its own video.

Discord did put out one tweet that appeared to address the situation, but didn’t offer an explanation for what went wrong:

Whatever the reason for the error, it appears to have been fixed. Discord’s video has been sitting at ~1.4 billion views for a solid 24 hours.

The question now is: Will it get to keep those views?

And are there any potential repercussion for YouTube? If the video was looping unseen in the background of users’ Discord sessions, did it serve ads? Will YouTube have to repay advertisers for over a billion views’ worth of marketing that no one saw?

“Oops” indeed.

We’ll update this story if we hear any details from Discord and/or YouTube.