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Chess.com Has Stopped Working On 32bit iPads After the Site Hit 2^31 Game Sessions (chess.com)
Apple's decision to go all in on 64bit-capable devices, OS and apps has caused some trouble for Chess.com, a popular online website where people go to play chess. Users with a 32bit iPad are unable to play games on the website, according to numerous complaints posted over the weekend and on Monday. Erik, the CEO of Chess.com said in a statement, "Thanks for noticing. Obviously this is embarrassing and I'm sorry about it. As a non-developer I can't really explain how or why this happened, but I can say that we do our best and are sorry when that falls short." Hours later, he had an explanation: The reason that some iOS devices are unable to connect to live chess games is because of a limit in 32bit devices which cannot handle gameIDs above 2,147,483,647. So, literally, once we hit more than 2 billion games, older iOS devices fail to interpret that number! This was obviously an unforeseen bug that was nearly impossible to anticipate and we apologize for the frustration. We are currently working on a fix and should have it resolved within 48 hours.
Switch to unsigned, get another 2 billion
Might be a fairly short-term fix. Remember Coca Cola's CEO saying "A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning" and that was 20 years ago.
He not only lacks technical skills he clearly not even competent as a CEO because he missed the golden opportunity to highlight the success of chess.com: "We did not anticipate the huge popularity of chess.com which caused us to exceed two billion chess games which were more games than some of the code could handle. We apologise for the oversight and will be issuing a patch which will let us grow to 2^63, or over 9 quintillion games.".
Failing because you did not anticipate being a huge success makes you look a lot better than just failing because you think it is impossible to foresee overflowing an integer variable.
No, they are real games by real people. I personally have a bit over 15,000 games played. At this moment (~1PM eastern time on a Tuesday afternoon) there 28,384 players online and 10,158 games currently in progress. The very large majority of those games are 5 minutes or less. Almost all of mine are 2/1 (two minutes per side with a one second increment after each move).
Also, it's not a bot-friendly site. There is no API, and no real point to hacking it when other sites are much more amenable to bot play. If they detect a computer-aided game (it's not difficult) the account is banned.