Original “RickRoll” Rick Astley Video Gets Removed [Updated]

Update II: The video is finally back.

Update: it appears as if the removal of Rick Astley’s song was non intentional, reports Mashable. The video is currently not yet up, but a YouTube spokesperson made the following statement:

“With 20 hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube, we count on our community members to know our Community Guidelines and to flag content they believe violates them. We review all flagged content quickly, and if we find that a video does violate the guidelines, we remove it, on average in under an hour. We also have a team that is dedicated to identifying and removing spam from YouTube. Occasionally, an account flagged by users or identified by our spam team is mistakenly taken down. When this is brought to our attention, we move quickly to take appropriate action, including restoring videos that had been mistakenly removed and channels that have been mistakenly suspended.”

If you’ve used the internet for more than five minutes of your life, chances are you’ve been “RickRolled” a time or two (or more). Simply put, it’s on of the internet’s most popular memes — and generally comes in the form of a link that you’re expecting to take you to wherever it  is you’re going — which instead points you to a video of pop sensation Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” They can be commonly found on web forums — and victims quickly become irritated, despite the fact it’s comedic gold.

With over 30 million views accrued since being uploaded, the video has been mysteriously been taken down. Users who attempt to watch the video are presented with the following message:

“This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

Still, there’s no shortage of the video on YouTube. Example: