Twitter, Facebook both survive rumored Ragnarok

O NOES!!! 12 Friday was supposed to be disastrous for both Facebook, which threw open the doors on its new personalized URLs for the masses, and Twitter, which some predicted would experience "twitpocalypse" when the number of Tweets passed 2,147,483,647. Both events were far less dramatic than the hype.

Facebook's engineers were prepared for server trouble during the land grab, which kicked off at 9:01 pm PDT. But though the traffic was considerable -- CNET reported 200,000 new URLs registered in three minutes, and Mashable (hunkered down in the Facebook war room) claimed a million settled within the first hour -- the event passed with no reports of even palpable delay in page service.

Twitpocalypse was much the same -- a scheduled meltdown that wasn't. Mark Gibbs at Network World had some fun with it while explaining the problem. (The number above is the maximum number of a 32-bit signed integer. Twitter gives every tweet a unique identifier, but didn't originally plan for the total number of tweets to exceed that integer space -- and neither did some third-party Twitter apps.) Twitpocalypse recorded scattered outages for applications such as Twitterfox and (as reported by Macworld) certain iPhone apps, but mainly the event was simply the occasion for a nice Dune reference.

Both events were, as averted tech mishaps often are, characterized by some as "another Y2K." In both cases, though, it's accurate -- in the sense that foresight and planning solved the problem before the deadlines arrived. Facebook's people were plied with Chinese food and gathered into a room to face down whatever 9:01 pm was to bring them; Twitter's crew evaluated their readiness and chose to time the rollover for maximum staff availability. Both efforts succeeded -- only to have some observers claim it was no big thing in the first place. Isn't it comforting to know that tech support is thankless in every sphere of endeavor?