World As We Know It Comes To End, Part I

“Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’ Pulled From YouTube,” Mashable reports:

Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” the much-maligned but still catchy pop music video that’s taken the web by storm, has passed into nothingness. The video was removed from YouTube by the original publisher (Black’s record label, Ark Music Factory) as of 4 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.The single is still available for sale on iTunes, but all you’ll find among the 11,500 YouTube search results for “Rebecca Black Friday” are parody videos, remixes and commentary. In fact, the entire account that originally housed “Friday” has been closed.

Love it or hate it — and chances are, you hate it — Rebecca Black’s music video “Friday” had racked up an impressive 64 million YouTube views since its inauspicious debut last month. However, when it comes to sentiment, “Friday” was killing it, and by “it,” we mean “any feelings of charity or kindness you may feel toward Ark and its teenie bopping popsters.”

Mashable adds, “We’ll keep an eye on the video’s URL; the clip may pop up again shortly. In the meantime, we have reached out to Ark for a statement on why the video was pulled in the first place.”

Fortunately though, in the interim, Phil Connors can rest a little easier in the morning:

[youtube e7ReCtipPac]

Update: Our short national nightmare is over — or has only just begun; the video has been restored. No word yet as to why it had gone down the memory hole in the first place, although, as Mashable notes in an addendum, “Ark Music Factory owner Patrice Wilson reported that his YouTube account had been hacked last Thursday; however, he reported back yesterday that the account status was ‘all good.'”