Snowflake ID Decoder and Timestamp Converter

What is a Snowflake ID?

A Snowflake is a 64-bit unique ID format created by Twitter in 2010 and later adopted by Discord, Mastodon, Instagram and many others. Every Snowflake embeds the time it was created, so you can extract that time with simple bit shifting. No API call is needed.

Snowflake bit layouts

To get the timestamp, shift the ID right by the number of low bits (22 for Discord and Twitter, 16 for Mastodon) and add the epoch. Use the Custom preset for your own Snowflake-style generator with a different epoch.

Common uses

• Account age checks: see when a Discord account was created, which helps spot fresh spam or raid accounts.
• Moderation and support: find exactly when a message was sent, even after it was edited.
• Pagination by date: use the Date → Snowflake converter to build an ID for the before/after parameters of Discord's message history API, or X's since_id/until_id.
• Debugging: sort and correlate events across services that use Snowflake IDs.

Decode a Snowflake in code

JavaScript

// Discord: milliseconds since 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z
const DISCORD_EPOCH = 1420070400000n;

function snowflakeToDate(id) {
  return new Date(Number((BigInt(id) >> 22n) + DISCORD_EPOCH));
}

snowflakeToDate('175928847299117063'); // 2016-04-30T11:18:25.796Z

Python

from datetime import datetime, timezone

DISCORD_EPOCH = 1420070400000

def snowflake_to_datetime(sid: int) -> datetime:
    ms = (sid >> 22) + DISCORD_EPOCH
    return datetime.fromtimestamp(ms / 1000, tz=timezone.utc)

snowflake_to_datetime(175928847299117063)
# datetime.datetime(2016, 4, 30, 11, 18, 25, 796000, tzinfo=timezone.utc)

Comparing ID formats? See the ULID, UUID v7 and MongoDB ObjectId tools. Those formats also embed a timestamp.

Frequently asked questions