Welcome to the Twitpocalypse: All Hell May Break Loose Today
MG Siegler, TechCrunch: Twitpocalypse is the name given
to a bug that’s about to be exposed.
Apparently, it’s similar to the Y2K bug in its nature, and stems from the
fact that every tweet sent out has a unique numeric identifier. This identifier is about to hit 2,147,483,647. This number is the signed integer limit and apparently when some third-party Twitter clients start hitting it, the identifiers will start turning negative, and those apps are likely to crash as a result.
This crash was supposed to happen sometime tomorrow, according to the countdown, but it looks like Twitter has just moved up the Twitpocalypse time to 21:00 GMT, which is 2 PM Pacific/5PM Eastern time today. Yes, in a couple hours.
They’re forcing the failure now so that all hands are on deck working on the issue, rather than having it go down in the middle of the night.
