If you are a frequent Twitter user you may have already heard about the Twitpocalypse. For those of you who aren’t aware, here is a quick and simple explanation:
The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. The unique identifier associated to each tweet has now exceeded 2,147,483,647.
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.
Twitter itself is immune to the Twitpocalypse, but third-party Twitter applications can be affected. Many third-party Twitter application developers issued updates prior to the Twitpocalypse, which happened overnight, in an attempt to avoid any troubles. Some were able to avoid the problem like Big Stone Phone, the developers of Twittelator Pro, but others may have not faired so well.
The Iconfactory, the developers of Twitterrific, have issued a statement indicating that their application has officially been affected by the Twitpocalypse:
We apologize for problems that iPhone and iPod touch Twitterrific users are currently experiencing due to the so-called Twitpocalypse. A fix for these issues was included in the 2.0.1 release to the App Store weeks ago, but the application is indeed returning errors at this time. Proof that it’s sometimes difficult to test for errors / conditions that happen in the future.
We are investigating a fix to the bug as we speak, but it may take some time to get the fix completed and through the App Store approval process. We will do our best to expedite a new version that corrects these problems to you, but we ask that you please have patience and bear with us. The Mac desktop version of Twitterrific appears to be unaffected.
We ask you to follow @twitterrific for the latest news on a bug fix as well as when you can expect the fix to appear in the App Store. Thank you.
Now that the clock has struck zero, you should check your Twitter application of choice to ensure that it hasn’t been affected. The Iconfactory seems to have been the only developer who has come out and said that their application has been affected, at least so far.
Feel free to leave a comment below telling us if your iPhone Twitter application has been affected by the Twitpocalypse.
Twittelator Pro flew past the four horsemen of the twitpocalypse without looking back
http://tinyurl.com/twitpro
Twitter.com gave us plenty of advance warning so we were able to release a version that could deal a few weeks back – plus we added Audio Tweeting and alas, in app Blocking for the new crop of spammers.
Twitterific is still down but honestly this does not make sense to me. Why would a seemingly random large number cause this? At least with y2k it made sense. can someone explain?
Since I am no programmer, I will let Wikipedia explain it for you:
“The number 2,147,483,647 is also the maximum value for a 32-bit signed integer in computing. It is therefore the maximum value for variables declared as int in many programming languages running on popular CPUs, and the maximum possible score for many video games. The appearance of the number often reflects an error, overflow condition, or missing value.” – Wikipedia
Hope that helps.