This is an excellent example of missing a key requirement when building applications. The API team failed to build a scalable application for accepting the incoming data (Problem: limitation on "unique identifier" variable assigned for each post "tweet" - fixed limit is too small for actual data capacity received via API). To their credit, twitter's growth has been unbelievably exponential, so it understandable to "miss" a key requirement like this as they may have never foreseen the need to scale up their API app this much; however, the sharp upward growth trending has been quite clear for some time (lots of warning) - oops. - Susan Beebe

considering that some of the earliest tweets have gone missing, maybe their fix is to roll over ? - martin english

Actually, Twitter is just fine, they have been handling that case since the start. It's only the 3rd party clients that may be impacted is their software is not designed to handle large numbers. - fbrunel