The past several weeks since Elon Musk’s takeover have seen Twitter in turmoil as rapid changes hit the platform, and tonight it appears something is going on with the Twitter API as Tweetbot and many third-party Twitter clients are down.
Around 11pm ET this evening, many Twitter users noticed that third-party clients were throwing back error messages related to the Twitter API. This widespread outage is occurring 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, thankfully, appears unaffected.
Whether this is a temporary outage or an intentional decision by Twitter remains to be seen, as the company has issued no official explanation at this time.
it does stand to reason, though, that it is possible Twitter may be killing off third-party clients. These clients generally do not bring any ad revenue for the platform, something that Musk has made clear is a priority in his tenure so far. Just this week a report from The Information revealed desperate measures to keep ad buyers on board, and many Twitter users have noted major increases in the number of ads and frequency of ads seen on the platform. Twitter also recently forced users on iOS to view the “For You” tab by default rather than the “Following” tab that actually shows what accounts they are following.
Another piece of evidence pointing to this being an intentional decision on Twitter’s part would be that apps that use the API but are not full clients appear to still be working. It’s only replacements for official Twitter apps that are broken.
Details remain largely unclear at this point in time, but we’ll update our coverage as more information becomes available.
Twitterrific has acknowledged the problem, but offered no further insight.
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