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"When Twitter goes down unexpectedly, the Twitterverse has often gone nuts with confusion and anger. It was only last year when Twitter's stability issues turned the fail whale into a running downtime joke.  Even as recently as this January, Twitter couldn't handle the keynote at MacWorld.  And now, Twitter is magnitudes bigger, so what would happen if it went down in dramatic fashion?\nWell, if you believe Twitpocalypse, we're going to see something catastrophic on June 13th.  In fact, this page, which has been making the social media rounds, predicts that Twitter will be ravaged with disaster at 5:05 AM ET (10:05 AM GMT).  Specifically, it predicts third-party Twitter apps will crash, creating chaos across the Web.  Could this really happen?  And on what basis does this website predict a Twitpocalypse anyway?According to the website, the Twitpocalypse will occur due to a Y2k-like bug.  Their explanation:\n\n\"The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. Very soon the unique identifier associated to each tweet will exceed 2,147,483,647.\nFor 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.\"\n\nThe website also has a counter where it counts up the number of tweets and provides an exact ETA when we'll meet the end of Twitter society as we know it:\n\n\n\n\nIt's all very slick and apocalyptic, but we aren't getting into our bomb shelters.  Just like the Y2K bug, we think it's most likely a hoopla about nothing.  If there was a serious bug that was going to affect your Tweetie, Seesmic Desktop, or TweetDeck, we're pretty sure that Twitter would have made some mention by now.  Even if there was an issue, Twitter could probably fix it on their end.\nAnd even if the worst case scenario occurred and 3rd party apps simply went bonkers, Twitter.com should still work fine.  This Twitpocalypse won't come close to an actual fail whale.  However, if you like to play it safe, be sure to update all of your Twitter apps before June 13th.  And don't forget to stock up on water and canned food.\nMore Twitter Resources from Mashable\n\n- Local Tweets: 9 Ways to Find Local Twitter Users in Your Town\n- Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School\n- HOW TO: Create Custom Twitter Backgrounds\n- 10 Ways to Share Music on Twitter\n- HOW TO: Find a Job on Twitter\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/06/10/twitpocalypse/>