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The Twitterati are stocking their bomb shelters with Twinkies in preparation for the "Twitpocalypse," the time at which the number of tweets sent passes the 2,147,483,647 mark, which is the maximum value of a 32-bit signed integer (technically, it's one-half of 2 to the 32nd, minus 1). Each Twitter message has a unique identifier based on that counter.

similar to the Y2K bug. The unique identifier associated to each tweet has now exceeded 2,147,483,6471 [...] 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.