Snowflake ID (Discord)

A Discord Snowflake is a 64-bit, time-sortable id used for every user, message, channel, and guild. Layout (bits 63 down to 0): a 42-bit millisecond timestamp offset from the Discord epoch 1420070400000 ms (2015-01-01), a 5-bit internal worker id, a 5-bit internal process id, and a 12-bit per-process increment. It is a Twitter-Snowflake derivative that repartitions the machine bits and uses a different epoch.

identifier

spec: Discord Snowflake (Discord Developer Docs)

length 64 bits sortable decimal uint64 (delivered as a JSON string to avoid 53-bit float precision loss)

example:

175928847299117063

field	bits	meaning
timestamp	42	Bits 63-22: milliseconds since the Discord epoch 1420070400000 (2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC).
worker_id	5	Bits 21-17: internal worker id.
process_id	5	Bits 16-12: internal process id.
increment	12	Bits 11-0: counter incremented for every id generated on that process.

Discord epoch is 1420070400000 ms (2015-01-01); add it back to the timestamp field to get Unix ms. Discord uses 42 timestamp bits (vs Twitter's 41).
Worked example 175928847299117063 decodes to timestamp 41944705796 (-> 2016-04-30 11:18:25.796 UTC), worker 1, process 0, increment 7.
A Twitter-Snowflake derivative: it splits the 10 machine bits as 5-bit worker + 5-bit process rather than 5-bit datacenter + 5-bit worker, and uses the 2015 Discord epoch.
Sorts by creation time because the timestamp is the high-order field; always treat as a string in JSON (exceeds JS 53-bit safe integers).

provenance

source: https://docs.discord.com/developers/reference
version: Discord Developer Docs — Reference > Snowflakes (retrieved 2026-05-29)
retrieved: 2026-05-29 · updated: 2026-05-29T00:00:00Z

per-fact attribution:

ext.bit_layout — https://docs.discord.com/developers/reference Discord docs: 42-bit timestamp (bits 63-22) ms since epoch 1420070400000, 5-bit internal worker id (21-17), 5-bit internal process id (16-12), 12-bit increment (11-0).
ext.example — https://docs.discord.com/developers/reference Discord docs worked example 175928847299117063 -> ts 41944705796, worker 1, process 0, increment 7.
ext.notes — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_ID Second independent source confirming the snowflake family, the Discord epoch, and that the 64-bit id is delivered as a string in JSON to avoid float precision loss.

Snowflake ID (Discord)

identifier

provenance

see also