The Youtube video for Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee's Despacito was removed by hackers days after it hit 5 billion views.
On Tuesday users searching for the official promo on the Vevo YouTube channel were directed to an image of a group wearing masks and pointing guns and then informed "This video is unavailable".
The record breaking clip is for the original track rather than the chart-topping remix featuring Justin Bieber. It became the most popular YouTube video of all time in August last year and hit 5 billion views on Sunday. It has since been restored to the website.
According to the BBC, other artists including Shakira, Selena Gomez, Drake, Katy Perry, Chris Brown and Taylor Swift have also had videos defaced by the hackers, who call themselves Prosox and Kuroi'sh. The cyber criminals changed the titles of tracks to include their names and phrases like "Free Palestine" but the actual content was unaltered.
Details of the hack were posted on a Twitter account purporting to belong to Prosox, who claimed they had used a computer coding script to perform the prank.
The hacker wrote, "@YouTube Its just for fun i just use script "youtube-change-title-video" and i write (sic) "hacked" don t judge me i love youtube <3."
In a later tweet, Prosox claimed they were not personally responsible for the deletion of the Despacito video and advised Vevo bosses to increase their security measures.
"@Vevo You have all my respect but do not leave the control to your site to any developer did not take into account this hacking it was a fun if we would like to harm your customers we would delete all the video but I did not delete despacito must believe me (sic)," the online prankster added.
