Lil Nas X, Kanye West, and Taylor Swift were among the Vevo YouTube channels hacked Tuesday

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Some of the world's biggest stars gave fans strange music videos on Tuesday. Many artists, including Michael Jackson, The Weeknd, and Ariana Grande, were affected. Hundreds of millions of dollars are added to the subscriber counts of the channels in question. Paco Sanz, a Spanish conman sentenced to two years in jail after being convicted of fraud for lying about having terminal cancer, was shown to viewers before the videos disappeared.

Vevo, which bills itself as the world's leading music video network, did acknowledge the incident, but did not respond to requests for comment. A person who responded to contact via Vevo's public press information requested not to be named because of the incident. Some videos were uploaded to a small number of Vevo artist channels by an unauthorized source.

ATTENTION: Major artists are currently being hacked by @lospelaosbro

so far it looks like Juice WRLD, Eminem, Ariana Grande, Harry Styles, Justin Bieber, Travis Scott, Trippie Redd, Michael Jackson, The Weeknd, and even more artist's YouTube channels have been hacked! pic.twitter.com/UtL6yiKxRF

— Music Countdowns (@MCountdowns) April 5, 2022

They claimed that no pre-existing content was accessible to the source and that the videos are gone. While the artist channels have been secured and the incident has been resolved, as a best practice Vevo will be conducting a review of our security systems.

The most-viewed video of all time is now second, behind the most-viewed music video of all time.

Efforts have been made to secure popular channels. Last year a report highlighted a campaign targeting creators, YouTube required millions of popular channels to enable two-step verification, and Google gave away hardware credentials to over 10,000 high-risk users.

The attacker was able to continue uploading across high-profile channels for several hours because of an apparent compromise somewhere along the Vevo.

The people who operate the pages were unable to do anything about the issue. The artist information page of Vevo explains that it works by creating a separate verified Artist Channel to upload videos, and that the videos are then uploaded to the artist's own YouTube page. Independent content providers or the artist's music label can upload content to Vevo, which will send it to YouTube and other channels.