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21st May 2016

That brilliant video of the mum in a Chewbacca mask has smashed Facebook’s live record

Nearly 100m people have watched the joyous video in the last two days.

Ellen Tannam

This is what the internet was made for.

Texas woman Candace Payne has attracted a huge amount of attention all over the globe for a simple video she transmitted via Facebook Live on Thursday.

Cadence is a big Star Wars fan, and the video shows her unboxing a Chewbacca mask in a department store carpark. What follows is one of the most joyous thing you’ll see all day.

As of this post, over 99 million people have witnessed her unbridled joy at the unboxing of the mask, while it has been shared over 2.5 million times on Facebook in the last 48 hours.

That makes Candace’s video the biggest hit yet for Facebook’s live streaming service. The record until now was BuzzFeed’s exploding watermelon video, with 10 million views.

Speaking to the BBC, Candace said: “That’s just crazy. I’m just laughing – in all honesty, that is ridiculous. I’ve looked at the number of views and it just seems like someone is just playing with a calculator.”

Needless to say, such a massively viral video has provoked a big response:

Chewie himself loves it:

https://twitter.com/ohchrisburton/status/733934190975188992

Some weren’t quite feeling it as much:

https://twitter.com/pda089/status/733846592462065664

You might just be, Paul.

For her part, Candace is just thrilled that her unplanned video is bringing so much joy to the world.

“Everyone has been really encouraging,” she said in her BBC interview.

“My friends and family are saying it’s not degrading or anything for me. It just makes other people laugh. I’m seeing how many people are saying ‘I suffer from depression, and this video is the first time I’ve laughed out loud in like two months.”

And of course, the mask in question has sold out in most retailers in the US since the video went out.