Twitpocalypse: Coming to Your Apps

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Tweeple, the Twitpocalypse is upon us.

If you wonder why your favorite Twitter applications aren't working around 5 p.m. today, it's because of the Twitpocalypse . Yes, the Twitpocalypse—which is a bug similar to the Y2K bug.

Here's how it works: Every tweet you send has a unique numeric identifier. The number is about to hit 2,147,483,647. Experts say that number is the signed integer limit, and apparently when some third-party Twitter applications—like Tweetdeck or Twitterberry-- start hitting it, the identifiers will turn negative. At that point, those apps are likely to crash.

The predicted crash was expected to happen sometime Saturday, but rather than have such a mass outage on a weekend or in the middle of the night when Twitter's staff is less than a weekday, they say they'll force it to happen at 5 p.m. EST on Friday, June 12. This way, they'll have an all-hands-on-deck approach to what will likely be mass tweeple hysteria.

Twitter says they hope they'll be able to resolve the issues that pop up very quickly.

Click here to follow TwitterAPI on Twitter.