Complete and utter pandemonium. Little birdies running around with their heads cut off, beached fail whales all over the place. Geeks, social media experts, and Ashton Kutcher all have debilitating panic attacks as the Twitterverse begins to implode on itself, leaving us without any doorway to 140 character conversations. As horrific as this image may be, it soon may become a reality at 1:15 GMT tomorrow, when the Twitpocalypse is expected to bring all the damnation, fury, and hell of the internet upon us. (Though this time varies by a few hours depending on where you look.)
Without getting all geeky on you, here’s the basic rundown.
Every single tweet in Twitter’s system has a numeric identifier. The maximum value is the ridiculously high 2,147,483,648. However, with Twitter’s popularity booming out of control, we’re rapidly approaching this numbered finish line. Without getting into all the mumbo-jumbo, what we’re saying is that when this limit is met, all hell may break loose as Twitter Apps all over crash as a result (for the nerd-explanation, click here).
While many suggest this is just like the Y2K myth and panic, that’s not stopping people from fretting. There have already been over 1900 Tweets about this potential catastrophe sent in the last 45 minutes alone. While there isn’t much anyone can do to prevent this potential crisis, here at OneRiot we’re gonna go down with this ship. If Twitter is toast for a while, well we’re just going to take advantage of all the precious time it has left. Follow us, and hurry, we may be the last follow you have for a while.
via @starlyth
