News the highly influential Japanese video sharing site "NicoNico" hit by ransomware attack, likely won't return for months.

[Krvavi Abadas]

it can't be understated how much of a serious blow to internet history it would be if the site doesn't survive this. a wide variety of memes and songs originated from the site, including....

Ievan Polkka (uploaded September 04, 2007)

while the song wasn't original to Miku, with it's lyrics dating as far back as 1928. it effectively established the character as a worldwide icon, with the signature leek becoming an iconic part of the lore.

a few other notable VOCALOID songs

• World is Mine (originally uploaded May 31, 2008)
• magnet (originally uploaded May 1st, 2009)
• Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! (originally uploaded July 25, 2010, a cover of this song was used in the particularly famous "Nyan Cat" meme.)

Airman ga Taosenai (uploaded May 26th, 2007)
"filk songs" of various properties were a common sight on NicoNico, but none are quite possibly as iconic as this one. discussing the sheer challenge of fighting Air Man in Mega Man 2 (for context, the Japanese version of the game lacks the difficulty options. and defaults to what the western release refers to as "difficult" mode.) the song proved to be so popular that CAPCOM officially released a version of it in their 2012 album "Rockman Holic"

a few other notable video game arrangements

• Omoide wa Okkusenman! (originally uploaded February 6, 2007)
• Western Show on Super Mario World (originally uploaded February 8th, 2008)
• Cirno's Perfect Math Class (originally uploaded October 25th, 2008)

some more standard memes that were popularized by the site include this oddly unsettling Mcdonalds commercial and the "Automatic Mario" (notably, Mario Maker specifically encourages people to make levels like this, by having "Auto-Mario" as one of the tag options.) series.

 

[pinetree]

Oh wow, I knew about the issues Kadokawa was having but this feels unprecedented... NicoNico is huge!

 

[FiniteInfinities]

I'm hopeful that this will come back up eventually without any data loss, but this is a stark reminder that sites like NicoNico and YouTube can go down at any time for any reason, whether by cyberattack or Kadokawa/Google doesn't want to pay for these platforms anymore. NicoNico and YouTube are ultimately temporary services that corporations provide to profit from and are not meant for any long-term preservation efforts.

I actually found out about this cyberattack last week because I was researching an obscure visual novel, and lo and behold, some of the only info about it anywhere on the Internet is from decades old NicoNico videos that are currently inaccessible. Just my luck that the service goes down for months as I started to look into it.

 

[Dekuman]

Thesee are just high profile ones. Retailers are being hit as well and i've heard from work one of our partner organizations got hit.

Be careful what you click

 

[Zanreo]

Welp... really hope it doesn't take them too long to recover! I have so many memories from Niconico memes, including the many medleys...