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Twitpocalypse: The End is Nigh, Today's The Day That Twitter Died
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by Truemorist | June 12, 2009 at 10:31 am
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In what could easily be mistaken for an early 21st century, late-oughts, techno-publicity stunt, the folks at WhereCloud are hailing the coming demise of Twitter as we know it — and fleeing for the luddite hills with cries of the impending Twitpocalypse.
Is the end nigh? Could we be fast approaching Tweet2K?
According to the latest prophesies emanating from the four horsemen of TechCrunch, Twitter may die today.
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.
Won't the crash and burn of the Twitterverse be little more than an en masse, ship-jumping cavalcade of fail-whales driving Twitter's Ark of servers to its watery grave?
Perhaps we should care not.
Perhaps, like Y2K, this will simply be another case of Crying Wolf...2.0.
The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. Very soon the unique identifier associated to each tweet will exceed 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.
Check the ominous fast-counting clock to mark your final minutes before the Twitpocalypse.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, indeed.
Dark days are ahead.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 10:41 on June 9th, 2009
This is idiotic at best. 1) How do you know apps are not already prepared to handle this? 2) How long do you really think it takes to patch a problem like this? I can't foresee it being a big deal in coding terms. 3) It's Twitter, not your bank account...
I hope this was just supposed to be a joke, because I am laughing :-)