Twitpocalypse & Who’s Affected?

If you’ve used Twitter within the last 12 hours, you no doubt have seen the non-stop “Twitpocalypse” tweets. Next to the Great Facebook Land Grab, it’s definitely a hot topic, affecting thousands of users, and their favorite Twitter applications. So what the heck is “Twitpocalypse”?

In a nutshell, the Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. There is a unique identifier that is associated to each tweet sent out over Twitter. It is assigned an incremental number value. That indentifier has now exceeded 2,147,483,647, officially at 2009-06-12 23:52:04 GMT.

What’s so special about this big number? Simply put, it’s the limit of a signed interger; the way data is stored in a computer’s memory. Not surprisingly, it’s a pretty complicated value, with that one sentence I didn’t even manage to explain properly. Those of you wanting the real scoop of what an “integer” is, feel free to visit Wikipedia – Integer.

Cool Random Tidbit: Twitter broadcasts 90 tweets per second!

The end result is that some of your favorite third-party Twitter services are not designed to handle this and the sequence will suddenly turn into negative numbers. At this point, they are very likely to malfunction or crash.

Twitter Applications And Services Affected By The Twitpocalypse:

Twitterrific.com – it’’s iPhone app, Twitterrific 2.0.1, is affected and offline, but their Mac version is fine.
Status: developers have released Twitterrific 2.0.2 for iPhone App Store approval.

TweetDeck.com – not all users affected by the inability to delete already read tweets.
Status: update patch already release for download

Tweetie iPhone App – reported issues with its Trend features.
Status: investigating

Beak Mac App – this popular new Twitter app for Mac users is also affected.
Status: developer indicates all will be well by this evening

DestroyTwitter.com – not affecting everyone, but reports that it’s attempting to create Tweets with negative IDs at times.
Status: investigating

The good news is, Twitter itself is just fine, and we can continue on with our regular tweeting as usual!!

== Joanne ==
P.S If your twitter service or app is affected and not reported above, please let us know so we can update this post.