Run for your lives, Silicon Valley's terrifying nightlife is upon us! Any minute now, Twitter plans to start the party by assigning an extra-large numeric ID to a tweet, thus breaking various Twitter programs. Then Facebook makes its move.

Twitter is forcing its previously-anticipated "Twitpocalypse" to occur before the weekend begins, so engineers will be on hand to deal with the fallout. When the microbloggins service finally assigns an ID of 2,147,483,647 to a tweet, some third-party Twitter applications may crash, as this is above the limit of what can be stored in a 32-bit data field (assuming the field allows for positive and negative, or "signed," integers).

The Twitpocalypse was originally planned for 5 p.m. ET/2 p.m. PT, but this has slipped. You can watch the situation unfold here or here, or listen for the cries of "32-bit signed integer overflow, woo-hoo!"

Once geeks get past the terror and excitement of the Twitpocalypse (Will Tweetie work? Who knows?!), the Facebook reckoning will soon be upon them, in which users get to try and claim vanity URLs like "facebook.com/yourname" starting at 12:01am ET/9 p.m. PT.

The lucky ones will end up with uninterrupted Twitter service and uber-cool Facebook handles, as they surf the Web, probably alone, late on a Friday night. Yay internet!

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