A couple of weeks ago, Twitter started circulating news about the upcoming Twitpocalypse. The easy 'default' storage format numbers in many programming languages and databases is the 'signed integer.' It's usually capable of representing values from -2,147,483,647 to +2,147,483,647. As fate would have it, the number of Twitter messages in existence was nearing that limit, and any developers who'd built software that stored tweets would encounter errors unless they started using larger number formats to store Twitter IDs.