Facebook Goes To 64 Bit User IDs

NewsCloud writes "Facebook has announced to developers that they are moving to a 64 bit user ID in November. At 32 bits, the current ID allows nearly 4.3 billion user accounts. Yet, despite having only 47 million users today, Facebook's move to 64 bits will allow it to have more than 18 quintillion (18,446,744,074,000,000,000) user accounts. Of course, there are currently only about 6.5 billion people in the world. Is Facebook setting their sights beyond Earth or just trying to avoid what happened when Slashdot ran out of space for comment IDs last year. Perhaps they are planning to implement personas."

Comments

Not just user IDs

[digital bath]

TFA says nothing specific to 'user ids' - it says object ids in general. I assume this includes things like comment ids, event ids, etc - which makes overflowing the 32 bit limit much more reasonable.