The past several weeks since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has seen turmoil with rapid platform changes, and something seems to be happening tonight with Twitter APIs like Tweetbot and several third-party Twitter clients broken.
At around 11pm ET this evening, several Twitter users noticed that third-party clients were throwing error messages related to the Twitter API. This widespread outage occurs across all third-party apps including Twitterrific, Fenix, Talon, and many others on both Android and iOS, as well as macOS. Tweetbot is also affected by the API outage, but Tweetdeck, fortunately, appears unaffected.
It remains to be seen if this is a temporary outage or an intentional decision by Twitter, as the company has not released any official explanation at this time.
However, it stands to reason that Twitter could kill third-party clients. These clients generally bring no advertising revenue to the platform, something Musk has made clear he’s been a priority in his tenure so far. Just this week a report from the information open Desperate measures to keep ad buyers on board Many Twitter users have noticed significant increases in the number and frequency of ads appearing on the platform. Twitter too It recently forced users on iOS To display the For You tab by default instead of the Following tab which actually shows the accounts they follow.
Another clue that this is an intentional decision on Twitter’s part is that apps that use the API but are not full clients It still seems to work. They are only replacements for the broken official Twitter apps.
The details remain largely sketchy at this point in time, but we’ll update our coverage as more information becomes available.
Twitterrific acknowledged the issue, but didn’t offer further insight.
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