Glossary / Developer basics
Glossary · Developer basics · checked Oct 24, 2026
Snowflake ID
Short answerA Snowflake ID is a 64-bit ID that sorts by time: a 41-bit millisecond timestamp, a 10-bit machine ID and a 12-bit sequence. Twitter introduced it in 2010; Discord and others use variants with their own epoch.
Why it matters
The timestamp is inside the ID, so you can read when a post or message was created from its ID alone.
Our number
Our Snowflake ID decoder reads the date out of X/Twitter and Discord IDs in the browser.
Go deeper on this site
Where it shows up here
It appears on 4 pages of this site: 2 Free tools, 1 Article, 1 path. A few to start with:
Sources
- X Engineering: announcing Snowflake (2010): blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/a/2010/announcing-snowflake (checked Oct 24, 2026)
Related terms
Up next
Go deeperSnowflake ID decoderThe page on this site that does the most with this term.Read it next →Also worth your time
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