David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
Twitpocalypse? Yeah, Like Y2K
By Azadeh Ensha, New York Times
June 12, 2009
The Internet isn?t short on bugs ? both real and imagined. Remember Y2K? How about the Conflickr worm? Today comes news of still one more.
Behold the Twitpocalypse.
If you believe it, the potential bug may cause some third-party Twitter services like TweetDeck to malfunction or crash once the unique identifier that?s associated with each sent tweet exceeds 2,147,483,6471.
Why that particular number? Twitter client apps that max out at this integer limit may be affected. As of posting time, the identifier count stands at around 2,137,010,000. (For those interested in keeping track, a running count can be viewed at Twitpocalypse.com).
According to a posting by Twitter?s Matt Sanford on Google?s Twitter discussion board, the micro-blogging service decided to force the limit today instead of waiting on its original Saturday, June 13, date so that it could have staff on hand to better respond to any problems.
Third-party failures aside, Twitter isn?t exactly a stranger to its own service outages, as anyone familiar with the now-infamous Fail Whale knows all too well.
For now, all remains quiet on the Twitter front, an early indication that Twitpocalypse ? like the Y2K bug before it ? will probably remain a disaster in name alone.
By Azadeh Ensha, New York Times
June 12, 2009
The Internet isn?t short on bugs ? both real and imagined. Remember Y2K? How about the Conflickr worm? Today comes news of still one more.
Behold the Twitpocalypse.
If you believe it, the potential bug may cause some third-party Twitter services like TweetDeck to malfunction or crash once the unique identifier that?s associated with each sent tweet exceeds 2,147,483,6471.
Why that particular number? Twitter client apps that max out at this integer limit may be affected. As of posting time, the identifier count stands at around 2,137,010,000. (For those interested in keeping track, a running count can be viewed at Twitpocalypse.com).
According to a posting by Twitter?s Matt Sanford on Google?s Twitter discussion board, the micro-blogging service decided to force the limit today instead of waiting on its original Saturday, June 13, date so that it could have staff on hand to better respond to any problems.
Third-party failures aside, Twitter isn?t exactly a stranger to its own service outages, as anyone familiar with the now-infamous Fail Whale knows all too well.
For now, all remains quiet on the Twitter front, an early indication that Twitpocalypse ? like the Y2K bug before it ? will probably remain a disaster in name alone.
