Rick Astley Video Crashes Vine

Vine crashed thanks to a “RickRoll” on Tuesday after 16-year-old Will Smidlein uploaded the full version of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Vine, a popular iPhone app that was introduced to the Android phone on Monday, allows users to upload six-second videos to share on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Smidlein crashed the servers by uploading the full three-and-a-half minute music video.

After uploading the video, Smidlein tweeted, “I think I broke Vine” along with a link to the video, which has since been taken down.

Smidlein, a web developer, reverse-engineered the app and figured out how the servers and app communicate. Using this information, he was able to upload the music video. Vine crashed soon after, and Twitter’s systems also experienced problems. Smidlein was direct messaged by a Twitter engineer and asked to take the video down. He told them he would be happy to, and later on Vine removed the full post.

Smidlein is remorseful for the trouble he caused. “I was mortified because I was afraid that the engineers would be called out looking kind of silly,” he told WKYC.

The rising high school junior, who has several years of experience with web development and coding, is starting an internship this summer with a tech startup.

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