Vine Gets RickRolled: 16-Year-Old Developer Hacks App To Upload Full Rick Astley Music Video

When Twitter released the Android version of the Vine app on Monday, it encouraged users to share their feedback. But Twitter wasn’t ready for one 16-year-old developer from Ohio who got around Vine’s six-second limit to RickRoll the entire video looping platform.

I think I broke Vine.vine.co/v/b3gY2OnrgZn
- Will Smidlein (@ws) June 3, 2013

In the same day Twitter released Vine for Android, Will Smidlein decompiled the Vine app and re-created the portion that allows users to create posts, add titles and insert images. This allowed him to upload all three and a half glorious minutes of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” before exploiting a bug to post the file Vine’s servers (Smidlein kept this part secret so Vine can patch the app). Just like that, the app designed to host six-second video loops was home to a never-ending RickRoll.

Smidlein told The Verge that he never intended the post to go viral, and took the post down after an engineer at Twitter asked him to with a direct message. However, a friend had already shared the Vine with his network and the RickRoll loop at gone viral. Smidlein later used Twitter to apologize to Vine’s engineers.

Sorry, Twitter/Vine engineers. I tried to keep it quiet, but the Internet never forgets.
- Will Smidlein (@ws) June 3, 2013

And it got taken down. Oh well, it was fun being internet famous while it lasted. I’ll wait for them to patch then write a post-mortem.
- Will Smidlein (@ws) June 3, 2013