The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. Very soon the unique identifier associated to each tweet will exceed 2,147,483,647.
For some of your favorite third-party Twitter services not designed to handle such a case, the sequence will suddenly turn into negative numbers. At this point, they are very likely to malfunction or crash.”
Is this Twitter app meltdown the Y2K bug of Twitterland, a hyped-up disaster prediction that will come to nothing? Twitter's developers are being prudent and "skipping" a few Tweet IDs so the potential problem happens now, and not late tonight. As they wrote on the Twitter Developer boards:
The overflow of the 32-bit signed integer value for status ids
(a.k.a "The Twitpocalypse" [1]) is fast approaching. The current
estimate is around tomorrow at around 11am GMT, or 3:00am Pacific time
in the case of Twitter. There is some discussion internally about
accelerating things so we'll be in the office and able to cope. Nobody
is their freshest at 3:00am, not to mention it would be nice to not
have apps broken throughout the weekend if one-person developer teams
don't notice. No decision has been made yet but I wanted to get
something out to you all so you know what's going on in the event we
decide to do this.
Thanks;
– Matt Sanford / @mzsanford
Twitter Dev
Twitter's devs later confirmed this plan on their Twitter account. Hopefully most Twitter apps will have been updated to handle this issue - we'll find out shortly.
The Next Y2K Panic?
What do you think? Is the Twitpocalypse a genuine issue or just another Y2K panic? Let us know in the comments!
Also let us know if you experience any issues using Twitter apps today.