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What Does 'Yep, This is Chunked' Mean?

by L. Turner

Some Twitter users got a weird message from the site on Thursday, specifically "Yep, this is chunked." That's right: Twitter displayed the bizarre message on its home page to many users during a temporary technical glitch Thursday afternoon, leading to lots of speculation about what exactly "Yep, this is chunked" means. Almost makes one nostalgic for the Fail Whale.

Let's dissect Twitter's statement one word at a time. First, but certainly not worst, is the term "Yep." For those unfamiliar, "yep" is a casual term for "yes." It's a millennial's affirmation. We'll skip over "this" and "is" and get right to the meat of the matter here: "Chunked."

What does chunked mean?

It's not chucked, which is a kinda colloquial way of saying 'thrown aggressively.' Nor is it chocked, like what you do to a car to keep it from rolling away. Nay, right here, right now, we are talking about chunked. I guess we'll just have to assume that Twitter's using "chunked" to mean 'bundled together.'

And we can take another leap after a little Googling and guess Twitter's programmers are discussing chunked transfer encoding, a mechanism in HTTP that allows a programmer to bundle bits of info on a page and send it in "chunks."

Twitter hasn't responded to our urgent request for comment on the matter, so we'll assume this was a little programming slip-up with programming language not meant to be made public. But enough tech talk. Let's get right into people's hilarious Tweeted reactions to the weird message.

Some wondered whether the site was being hacked.

Given that "chunked" is a common programming term, we'll err on the side of assuming the site is just fine. Just feeling a bit chunked is all.