If you were using Twitterific, Tweetie or other Twitter clients this weekend, chances are that you had some trouble getting onto Twitter. Don't feel bad - you weren't the only one. This weekend came to be referred by Twitter users as the Twitpocalypse because....well, it's complicated. Let's just say that Twitter kind of was gonna hit the planet, but like their hero Bruce Willis, Evan Williams and Biz Stone flew on a rocket ship to the Twitter meteorite, drilled into its core, and exploded it before it could collide with Earth. Also Steve Buschemi shot at them.

OK, so it didn't really go down like that. But here's what happened - Twitter hit a hard-coded limit in one of their integers. 2,147,483,647, to be exact. Seem like a random number? It is, to anyone who doesn't mess around with datatypes. Exceed that value in a signed integer and you'll end up with negative numbers instead of positive ones - and that's what happened this weekend, shutting down several popular Twitter applications.
The Twitter gang knew it was coming, and had warned us to keep on our toes and be prepared for possible disruptions. They patched the problem, earlier than expected, and by Sunday, most of the Twittersphere was online with no problem, save a few applications which required an update.
Rumors about this morning that installing the latest version of Twitterific will get that client working again, and we're hearing from other development sectors that other popular Twitter apps are being fixed as well. In the long run it didn't turn out to be the Twitpocalypse, but don't worry - Twitter's new integer limit is only a few short billion integers away, which means we'll get to sing this whole song again in a year or two.