YouTube confirms this was possible due to a bug, which has been fixed
Today, YouTube is considered an essential entertainment app on Android, but it all started with platform co-founder Jawed Karim’s first-ever upload on the site almost 18 years ago, titled “Me at the Zoo.” Recently, an impostor video titled “Welcome to YouTube!!!” was uploaded to the service, and by exploiting a bug, was able to predate Karim’s upload and steal a bit of its limelight. Thankfully, YouTube was swift to respond to the situation.
Karim’s video is just a 19-second clip of him in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo talking about the animal’s long trunk. It is, however, a revered piece of internet history, much like Jack Dorsey’s first tweet which traded hands as an NFT last year. In comparison, the bug-exploiting video was made to look like an announcement of YouTube’s launch, dripping with mid-2000s aesthetic and set to Van Halen’s Jump. Combined with the spoofed upload date of April 5, 2005 — weeks before Karim’s April 23 upload from the same year — it made for quite the believable prank.
It may be period-correct, but there are several telltale signs that “Welcome to YouTube!!!” isn’t what it claims to be. For instance, it has just 361,000 views at the time of writing, compared to the 253 million views accrued by Jawed’s upload. The fake first video’s uploader, a user called enn, also claims they created their account in September 2005, several months after the supposed first-ever upload.
Understandably, YouTube wasn’t too happy to find the “Welcome to YouTube!!!” uploader exploiting a bug to steal the spotlight from Karim’s video. In a statement to The Verge, a spokesperson for the video sharing platform acknowledged the issue and said a fix is in the works.
Rest assured, the oldest video on YouTube will always be ‘Me at the zoo’ which was uploaded on April 23, 2005, by one of our co-founders and helped kickstart more than 17 years of creativity on YouTube.
YouTube has since fixed the upload date on “Welcome to YouTube!!!,” which now displays January 26, 2023. It’s also an unlisted video now, meaning you can only find it using a dedicated link — not through YouTube search — and the exploited bug seems to have been patched as well. So, while we almost certainly won’t see more random videos vying for the indisputable “first-ever upload” tag, you have to give it up to ebb for highlighting the bug and snagging their 15 minutes of fame.
