A couple months ago the Twitpocalypse was all the buzz for a couple weeks.
The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. The unique identifier associated to each tweet has now exceeded 2,147,483,6471
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.
Twitter is reminding everyone that the problem is almost upon us. Here’s an email that Twitter’s Marcel Molina sent to the Twitter application developer mail list a little while ago:
Twitter status ids are fast approaching the maximum 32-bit *unsigned*
integer value (4,294,967,295).
The current estimate is that this will occur in approximately 60 days,
at the end of September. The 60 day window is a best-guess
approximation based on projections. It could conceivably happen
sooner.
Developers are encouraged to not only update their applications to use
a 64-bit integer (BIGINT/long long), but also verify that all
libraries they use are also prepared to handle 64-bit integers.
Twitter’s best guess is the end of September! I’m sure most of your favorite Twitter applications and services will have the problem resolved by then. It’s a fairly easy change for developers to implement. Muad’Dib says, “The tweets must flow”.
