Discord accidentally breaks GTA 6’s YouTube trailer record

Discord's April Fools Day video has accidentally broken the GTA 6 trailer's YouTube record for the most number of views in the first 24 hours of a video being posted that's not music.

Discord is an instant messaging and social platform and posted a video on its YouTube account of 'loot boxes' coming to the app with the caption "why would we ever bring loot boxes into a chat app".

Innocent enough, right?

But the video started recording hundreds of millions of views, completely eclipsing the GTA 6 trailer record - that record was 93 million, and there's a screenshot that shows the Discord video hit 1.4 billion in 22 hours.

It was eventually taken down.

Discord has since given a brilliant one word response to what happened.

So how exactly did it happen?

It seems Discord accidentally 'viewbotted' it's own video.

Explaining it on X / Twitter, software developer Marvin Witt said: "Discord managed to create a working YouTube view bot in 2024 by playing their loot box announcement trailer on loop in the background of the in-app toast."

The 'toast' is the notification about the video itself - because the video was directly integrated, it gained views without anyone actually watching it on YouTube.

He then shared a screenshot of a 'high-up developer at Discord' asking "how the f*** is this video getting so many views" which led Marvin to think this happened accidentally.

The video has since been re-uploaded on YouTube and has a significantly lower view count - although at the time of writing it still sits at number three in the trending chart with more than 2.75 million views in the past three days.

Discord Loot Boxes are here.www.youtube.com

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