Luis Fonsi’s record-breaking video for “Despacito” was temporarily deleted from YouTube after a small number of high profile Vevo accounts were hacked.
Just five days after it was announced that the video, which also features Daddy Yankee, had reached the remarkable milestone of becoming the first YouTube video in history to reach 5 billion views, it disappeared.
A still on the video showed several masked figures aiming guns at the camera, which is not a scene from the “Despacito” video. When fans attempt to press play, it said the video was unavailable.
The original clips had been posted by Vevo, a music video hosting service that is a collaboration between the “big three” record companies, Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment (SME) and Warner Music Group (WMG).
Other Vevo channels of artists like Shakira, Selena Gomez, Adele Chris Brown, Maroon 5, Drake and Taylor Swift, were also inaccessible.
The hackers, who call themselves Prosox and Kuroi’sh, used the online moniker of Kuroi’SH and had written “Free Palestine” below the videos.One of the hackers involved in the attack said that they used a script to tamper with the videos:
In a statement, YouTube told Billboard, “After seeing unusual upload activity on a handful of VEVO channels, we worked quickly with out partner to disable access while they investigate the issue.”
