Sick of Despacito? Hackers temporarily delete YouTube’s most watched video

Hackers on Tuesday targeted the YouTube videos of many high-profile musicians, temporarily deleting dozens of wildly popular songs, including Luis Fonsi’s hit Despacito.

The attack came days after Despacito—YouTube’s most-viewed video to date — crossed the five billion mark. The hackers replaced the song’s thumbnail with an image of a masked gang with guns from Netflix’s serial La Casa de Papel, Buzzfeed reported.

The hackers, calling themselves Prosox and Kuroi’sh, wrote “Free Palestine” beneath the videos, The Independent reported. Clicking on the thumbnail threw up an error which said the video wasn’t available.

A Twitter account that apparently belongs to the hackers claimed the hack was “just for fun”. The user @ProsoxW3b posted: “i write ‘hacked’ don t judge me i love youtube (sic).”

Other musicians affected included Shakira, Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Drake, Chris Brown and DJ Snake. The videos were on their Vevo channels, but it was not immediately clear whether the individual artiste accounts or Vevo itself was hit.

With some videos, the titles were changed to include the names of the hackers, but the actual video content was unaltered. Buzzfeed reported that a YouTube spokesperson directed all comments to “Vevo directly”.

Vevo was yet to make a statement on the hacking.

All the videos were restored later on Tuesday.