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Snowflake ID | |
| Other names | Twitter Snowflake X Snowflake |
Snowflake IDs, or snowflakes, are a form of unique identifier used in distributed computing. The format was created by X (formerly Twitter) and is used for the IDs of tweets. [1] It is popularly believed that every snowflake has a unique structure, so they took the name "snowflake ID". The format has been adopted by other companies, including Discord and Instagram. The Mastodon social network uses a modified version.
Snowflakes are 64 bits in binary. (Only 63 are used to fit in a signed integer.) The first 41 bits are a timestamp, representing milliseconds since the chosen epoch. The next 10 bits represent a machine ID, preventing clashes. Twelve more bits represent a per-machine sequence number, to allow creation of multiple snowflakes in the same millisecond. The final number is generally serialized in decimal. [2]
Snowflakes are sortable by time, because they are based on the time they were created. [2] Additionally, the time a snowflake was created can be calculated from the snowflake. This can be used to get snowflakes (and their associated objects) that were created before or after a particular date. [3]
| Offsets | Octet | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Octet | Bit | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
| 0 | 0 | 0 | Timestamp - first 31 bits | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 4 | 32 | Timestamp - last 10 bits | Machine ID | Machine Sequence Number | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A tweet produced by @Wikipedia in February 2025 [4] has the snowflake ID 1888944671579078978 The number may be converted to binary as 0001 1010 0011 0110 1110 0001 0010 1011 1011 0101 11|01 0110 1000|0001 0100 0010, with pipe symbols denoting the three parts of the ID.
The format was first announced by Twitter in June 2010. [1] Due to implementation challenges, they waited until later in the year to roll out the update. [6]