Twitter Gets Its Own Y2K Bug

Its being dubbed the Twitpocalypse. If you use TwitterBerry, Twhirl, Twitteriffic or TweetDeck, your Twitter world may come crashing down around you come June 12th. That according to a Canadian Mobile solutions company.

Wherecloud claims third party Twitter clients will fail on June 12th. Why? Here’s the companies reasoning behind the theory.  Apparently a unique identifier associated with every tweet is comprised of a signed integer. 2,147,483,647 is the limit of signed integers, so if your favorite client is badly coded then it won’t be able to deal with tweets above that number. Wherecloud has even set up its own countdown to the Twitpocalypse webpage.

So there you have it. The world will end June 12th because no one ever thought Twitter would reach 2,147,483,647 “tweets”.

[Via Current]