Third-party Twitter clients suffered sudden outage and now it is believed that Twitter did it intentionally. Users of third-party services that rely on Twitter API for access started reporting of issues with the services on Thursday with outage continuing into the weekend.
Third-party clients use Twitter API to access the services. These are apps built on Twitter platform by external developers. Connecting these apps to Twitter account grants the app access to your Twitter account.
According to The Information report, a senior Twitter engineer internally communicated this week that the “Third-party appsuspensions are intentional.” Another message shared on company’s internal communications reveal that Twitter is working on “approved talking points” for partners. The report also states that Twitter staff are discussing internally when the company will announce its decision.
According to a 9to5google report, Twitter could be removing third-party app access as these apps do not bring any ad revenue for Twitter, one of Musk’s high priorities for the company.
There are also reports that only select number of apps have suffered the outage. These are mainly apps that offer direct alternative to Twitter. Other clients that don’t offer the whole Twitter experience remain unaffected.
Elon Musk who is usually vocal of his thoughts has not given any response to these reports. Twitter has no PR team so there are no answers for developers to questions like why the services have suddenly stopped working or when can they expect a fix for it.
Reports of third-party clients like Twitterific and Tweetbot facing service outage started pouring in as early as Thursday night. Users seemingly faced issues with account log in and accessing the Twitter feeds.
“We’re aware that Twitterrific is having problems communicating with Twitter. We don’t yet know what the root cause is, but we’re trying to find out. Please stay tuned and apologies,” Twitterific posted on Twitter.
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