Discord's April Fools' Day video unexpectedly garnered over a billion views on YouTube within a single day. While Discord was seemingly unaware this would happen, some have formulated how the video blew up.
Discord Racks Up Insane YouTube View Count by Accident
Assumed to Have Inadvertently Created a YouTube View Bot
Discord jokingly announced on April Fools' the introduction of loot boxes, an in-game feature that randomly generates and rewards items to players, to the chat app. It's funny in and of itself, but something more hilarious happened. Discord's Loot Boxes video amassed over 1.48B views on YouTube - all seemingly by accident.
The video's view count surpassed even that of highly anticipated trailers, such as GTA 6's teaser trailer released last December, which amassed 61 million views within 12 hours and now stands at 183 million views in total. Viewers commented their amusement at the situation. "I can’t believe 17.5% of the entire global population is this excited for loot boxes."
Despite the staggering number of views, Discord's video falls far short of the most-viewed video on YouTube, the "Baby Shark" children's banger, which currently sits at around 14B views.
Discord's response to the situation added to the hilarity, telling one user on Twitter (X), "STOP PRESSURING ME I JUST BROKE A WORLD RECORD I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WE'RE DOING NEXT." Some suggested that Discord may have inadvertently triggered a form of "viewbotting," a mechanism that inflates view counts whenever the app is running or even merely upon opening.
Discord's video was widely assumed then to have been auto-playing continuously in the background of the app. "I love the fact the Discord devs knew this video would autoplay but they didn’t know it would happen every time they load the app," another user commented on the video.
As gathered from other reports, software developer Marvin Witt offered a possible explanation, suggesting that Discord was unaware they created a working YouTube view bot by playing the video "in the background of the in-app toast - a little popup in the bottom right of your Discord app," according to the developer.
As noted by Witt, even Discord developers seemed to have been unaware of their coding's outcome. "I should mention they presumably did this accidentally, even one of the high-up developers at Discord was confused as to how this was happening," Witt said in another tweet.
