Do you remember the original Twitpocalypse? The Twitterverse began to panic last June as it was revealed that a bug based on the unique ID of tweets would break 3rd party Twitter apps that were not prepared. Twitterific and TweetDeck were some of the victims of the Twitpocalypse.
Now Twitter tells us that the second Twitpocalypse is coming. This is not a surprise - we knew that there would have to be another one of these to account for 64-bit Twitter IDs. Now we know the date though, artificially set by Twitter: this Friday, September 11th.
Here's what Alex Payne, Twitter's Platform lead, had to say in Twitters' Development Talk Google Group:
As mentioned previously, the Twitter operations team will artificially
increase the maximum status ID to 4294967296 this coming Friday,
September 11th. This action is part of routine database upgrades and
maintenance.
If your Twitter API application stores status IDs, please be sure that
your datastore is configured to handle integers of that size. Thanks.