It appears that Discord accidentally filmed its own April Fool's video to break the GTA 6 trailer's record in half a day.

Discord's April Fool video has blown up on YouTube, garnering hundreds of millions of views in just a few hours, but it looks like there's a lot more going on here than meets the eye.

The video is titled “Discord loot boxes are here“, is a joke straight out of April Fools' Day about adding loot boxes to the online platform. This, you had thought, would be it. But a strange thing happened: the video had hundreds of millions of views in the blink of an eye, so many in fact, that It broke the record set by the victorious GTA 6 trailer.

How can this be? It appears that Discord accidentally “messed up” the April Fool's video. Developer Marvin Witt took to X/Twitter to say that Discord was able to create a working YouTube viewing bot by repeatedly playing the loot box announcement trailer in the background of an in-app toast notification about the video itself. Witt suggested this was an accident on Discord's part because an employee expressed confusion about what happened. IGN asked Discord for comment.

I should mention that they did this by mistake, and even one of the senior developers at Discord was confused as to how this happened pic.twitter.com/0uRLQRRzSq

– Marvin Witt (@NurM4rvin) April 2, 2024

At the time of publishing this article, Discord's loot box video had racked up 628 million views in just 17 hours. For context, “GTA VI Trailer 1” set a new record for debut 24-hour views for a non-music video on YouTube with over 93 million views.

Right now, Discord is tearing up this world record, but of course it was achieved through nefarious means. Will YouTube adjust my video view count in response? Meanwhile, the Internet is having its fun. “Discord accidentally creating a YouTube demo bot is the funniest April Fools' Day joke this year,” one user said in the YouTube comments.

In other Discord news, this week the platform is launching ads for the first time, via “Sponsored Tasks.” These quests give PC players in-game rewards for getting friends to watch a group of them play via Discord. Users can choose not to engage with them.

Wesley is IGN's UK news editor. You can find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can contact Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].