Twitpocalypse Not Now: Crisis Averted. Mostly.

So, as just about everyone on Twitter was talking about today, the possibility of a Twitpocalypse was upon us. The site tracking the possible failure of certain third-party Twitter apps not built to handle the signed integer limit, believed the crisis would happen tomorrow early in the morning (in the U.S.) — but Twitter pre-empted the problem by triggering it today instead, so all hands would be on deck to attack the problem. And it worked.

“As planned, we averted the twitpocalypse with a deploy this afternoon,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone tells us. Excellent news. But there is one small temporary casualty of the problem, Twitter Search has been paused for about an hour, I’m told. But it should be caught up and back to normal soon, says Stone.

So, everyone can calm down, for now. Just like the Y2K bug that much of the world freaked out about a decade ago, the Twitpocalypse came and went with nary a problem.

Update: As a few commenters have noted, and I’ve just confirmed, the popular Twitter app, Twitterrific, is completely broken right now due to API errors — at least the iPhone version. Some reports have said TweetDeck is facing similar problems.

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