There have been some reports that the so-called “Twitpocalypse” bug, an engineering problem associated with Twitter passing the 2,147,483,647 tweet mark, has broken the Twitterrific application for the Mac, among other Twitter applications.

The problem partly lies in the fact that Twitter tags all tweets with an auto-incrementing integer (i.e. 1, 2, 3, …), which effectively identifies all tweets uniquely in the Twitter tweet pool. However, some poorly-designed Twitter apps make use of this number by implementing a 32-bit type of integer in its source code, which has a maximum value of 2,147,483,647. Assigning a number higher than that to this type of integer results in  unexpected results in the applications. Therefore, when Twitter passed this number of tweets, and the applications tried to sync with the network, they fared poorly.

Twitter’s own network is unaffected, as is some Twitter applications like Twhirl. TweetDeck has reportedly been successfully updated.

Twitterrific has since then released an update that supposedly fixes this bug to Apple’s App Store, still pending approval.