Mysterious YouTube Video With '140-Year' Runtime Leaves Millions of Viewers Confused

A mysterious YouTube video that appears to have a runtime of over 140 years has gone viral, leaving millions of users perplexed and triggering a wave of technical investigation and conspiracy theories. The upload, which consists of a blank black screen with no audio, has defied the platform's standard duration limits, appearing in the feeds of users worldwide as a 'viral riddle.'

The video was uploaded on 5 January 2026 by an account using the handle @shinywr. While most professional and verified YouTube accounts are limited to a maximum upload length of 12 hours, this specific video displays a runtime of 1,234,567 hours, 30 minutes, and 0 seconds—equivalent to roughly 141 years of continuous footage.

The 'Secret' Channel

According to reports from UNILAD, the video has already accumulated over 2.1 million views. Despite its immense length, clicking on the video reveals a significant discrepancy: while the thumbnail and search result display the century-long duration, the actual playback scrubber often reverts to a standard 12-hour limit once the video begins.

The channel's origins have added a layer of digital intrigue to the phenomenon. The account's 'About' section lists North Korea as its location, a country where YouTube is famously blocked for the general public. Adding to the 'lore,' as netizens have dubbed it, the uploader pinned a comment on the video stating: 'Why are my videos getting recommended to people? This channel was supposed to be a secret,' as cited by The Times of India.

Technical Glitch or Metadata Trick?

Tech-savvy viewers and developers have quickly moved to debunk the supernatural or conspiratorial elements of the video. The consensus among the coding community is that the uploader has exploited a metadata glitch within YouTube's Data API.

YouTube stores video duration as a numerical value in milliseconds. If an uploader uses developer tools to feed the platform a 'broken' or deliberately overflowed value during the encoding process, the user interface (UI) can be tricked into displaying 'garbage math.' As noted by LatestLY, the 1.2-million-hour figure is likely a result of manipulating the stream manifest to show a specific, impossible string of numbers.

'The video is only actually 12 hours long,' one Reddit user explained, as reported by NDTV. 'It's a metadata exploit where they manipulate the video's length data to confuse the algorithm and the UI.'

Conspiracies and 'Lore'

Despite the technical explanations, the cryptic nature of the content has fueled darker theories. The video title is a simple question mark (?), and the description reportedly contains Arabic symbols which, when translated, read: 'Come, meet me in hell,' according to NDTV.

The @shinywr channel also hosts other anomalously long videos, including a 'YouTube Short' that claims to be 150 hours long—far exceeding the format's strict 60-second limit—and another video titled 'billionhours.' The account has gained nearly 30,000 subscribers in a single week as users flock to witness the glitch firsthand.

While YouTube has historically moved quickly to patch such exploits—such as the famous 2021 'YouTube That' glitch—the 140-year video remains live at the time of writing. For now, it stands as a digital curiosity, proving that even on a platform as established as YouTube, a well-placed line of 'garbage math' can still captivate millions.