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Category: Technology Author : Steven Hodson Posted: June 12, 2009
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Just to set the record straight about the imminent collapse of Twitter


twitter-collapse

As some of you may have noticed the possible crashing of Twitter, and we don’t mean the typical Fail Whale type, is being talked about on the web by a couple of blogs. The actual term is Twitpocalypse and results from the way that Twitter keeps track of each tweet made through the service.

This dire event which will occur primarily with Twitter clients happens because – well to quote the Twitpocalypse site:

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.

Interestingly enough the more popular and bigger name blogs might be only now catching onto this but I’d like to remind our readers that you actually heard about this imminent catastrophe here at the Inquisitr back in May of this year.

Yes folks, even though you won’t hear it on Techmeme or any of the other loudmouths The Inquisitr was right there at the forefront of keeping you informed of all things Twitter and catastrophic – just as we always will be but without the ego and bluster.










Comments


5 Archived Responses to “ Just to set the record straight about the imminent collapse of Twitter ”

  1. Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
    Jun 12, 2009

    You know what i most love about your coverage, Steven?

    Your humility.

    :-p

    Keep rockin' it man.

    –

    In all seriousness, it's bizarre to me that this is a problem. As a fellow developer, can you explain to me how this is going to cause problems? Even if it flips to negative numbers, presumably they'll all be unique, too, which is the point of a UID.

  2. John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises)
    Jun 12, 2009

    No ego, no bluster, just a big of crankiness. :)

    I just read “Batman”'s comment in response to the original post from May regarding a much higher upper limit for BIGINT. If Twitter were to go down for maintenance and revamp the system, would the Twitter apps have to be modified? (Twitter's actually changed their API with no advance warning before, so that wouldn't be anything new.)

  3. John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises)
    Jun 12, 2009

    Mark, can the apps read negative numbers? Or is there a possibility that the apps assume all numbers are positive?

  4. StevenHodson
    Jun 12, 2009

    I'm just a very humble type of guy Mark <snicker> as for the mechanics of it all it turns out to be pretty much a hoax started by a <shhhh> Canadian web company </shhhh>

  5. StevenHodson
    Jun 12, 2009

    We would never dream of doing anything like that John :) .. probably a transplanted 'Mericun <snicker>