Twitter has confirmed that the third-party client outage was intentional. After keeping the developers and the users of these third-party clients clueless for a week almost, the microblogging platform has finally revealed the reason behind the outage and it is as vague as it can be.
Twitter, in a post, writes that it’s “enforcing its long-standing API rules,” which “may result in some apps not working.” While the statement makes it clear that the outage was intentional, the post lacks any information these API rules like what is it or how it relates to the apps that have been restricted from Twitter’s API access.
Twitter’s response comes after almost a week since the third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific broke down on last Thursday.
“Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules. That may result in some apps not working,” reads the post.
Twitter’s imprecise response on the outage could also be the result of lack of a proper communication team. CEO Elon Musk, in less than a month of his joining, announced jobs cuts across all verticals including the company’s communication team. Twitter’s department in Germany reportedly has no communication team at all.
Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad told The Verge that he is unaware of any such API rule. “If there’s some long-standing rule that we’ve been unknowingly breaking for the last 10+ years, we’d love to know what it is so that, if possible, we can comply with it,” he was quoted by the website.
Earlier this week, there was a report from The Independent, citing a senior Twitter engineer. The official informed that the outage was intentional but gave no reasons for why it happened. The company is said to be working on “approved talking partners” for these third-party clients but it’s unclear when will the decision be announced. With Twitter now finally breaking is silence on this, we can expect the decision to be announced soon.
ALSO READ l Twitter intentionally suspended third-party app clients, report says
