On 23 May 2014, I broke Second Life. Impressive, considering I hadn’t worked there in almost 7 years at that point. I’d written the bug in 2001.

Of course, it was discovered almost immediately by Doug, who helpfully left a comment. The bug was setting the Linden World (lol) session ID to a signed 32-bit integer. Since session 0 was invalid, a rollover of this value would break sign in for everyone.

Today this would be a UUID — or at the very least a 64-bit value — but in early February 2001, with our heads fully wrapped around streaming and shaving bits, we noted the bug, changed nothing, and moved on. (Premature optiization, of course. Textures would dominate all the streaming bandwidth and a lot of bits we saved didn’t really matter.)

After all, 2,147,483,648 production sessions is (in technical terms) a lot.

A lot of sessions later

13-ish years later after writing the bug, Second Life had its 2-billionth-and-change session. Crash, go boom.

While Roblox and Fortnite have long-since eclipsed Second Life and brought user-created games and experiences to the world, billions of sessions is still pretty cool.