The rickroll, one of the internet's favourite memes, has been badly hit by the removal of the video on which it was based. Instead of being tricked into watching Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up, victims who click the link get a YouTube message: "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation".

Update: If you clicked the above link earlier, then you just might have been meta-rickrolled. It turns out that the video was removed by mistake, after YouTube suspended a user account flagged by a member of its spam team. So RickRoll'D is back, and it still has more than 30m views.





Rickrolling started at the 4chan forum (via the eggroll and duckroll), but became part of the mainstream in 2008. It brought Astley a new level of fame, though one that perhaps became tiresome. In response to a Fox News query, "a spokesman for his record label wrote back a single line: 'I'm sorry, but he's done talking about rickrolling.'"

There are, of course, several videos of Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up and other songs on YouTube, so you can keep right on rickrolling people, if you really must. The problem is that removing the D version breaks a large number of internet links, and there's no way to repair the damage short of YouTube reinstating the missing video.

Also, that kind of thing ultimately reduces trust in the net....

Hat tip: Neowin and its update.