Twitter has announced that it is postponing a complete switch to OAuth, dubbed the “OAuthcalypse”, by a month and a half due to the severe load and downtime being caused by the World Cup.

Currently, there are two ways to connect to Twitter apps: basic authentication (where you provide your username and password) and OAuth, which lets users hand out “tokens” for access to applications instead of sensitive account data. Twitter intended to cut off use of basic authentication on June 30th — 12 and a half days away — and even launched a countdown clock for the occasion so that application developers were prepared.

Since then, Twitter’s stability has been compromised due to critical mistakes setting up and maintaining the service’s internal network. It has resulted in constant downtime and fail whales.

With so much happening, Twitter has decided to push back Oauthcalypse to August 16th, a full month after the World Cup ends. Here’s exactly what’s going to happen, according to Twitter’s Raffi Krikorian:

“just to review what we’re going to be doing: starting on august 16 we’ll be ramping down the rate limits on basic auth roughly by 10 calls/hour/day ending on august 31st. on the 31st, you won’t be allowed to make any other basic auth calls. in other words, if you don’t do anything, you’ll get more and more frequent rate limit errors as you approach august 31st. starting on august 31st, any basic auth request will get a HTTP 403 response back.”

Summary: Starting on August 16th, Twitter will begin to limit the use of basic authentication until the 31st, when the switch to OAuth will be complete.

Given the circumstances, delaying the OAuthcalypse is the right move for the company, but one has to wonder what other features and projects are being pushed back due to the massive failure of Twitter’s internal network. This month is turning out to be Twitter Hell.