While users could log in to Tweetbot and browse through tweets, some said they couldn’t post anything to Twitter through the service without receiving an error message stating that they had reached a “data limit.” But now users say that i can’t log in at all.
“And now dead again, along with some old unused API keys, showing that this was intentional and that we and others were targeted specifically,” Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad. write in mastodon. “I wouldn’t have changed the keys in the first place if there had been even a shred of communication.”
The client didn’t reconnect because of something Twitter did. haddad account the edge that they hadn’t heard anything from Twitter, so they “decided to start using new API keys and see if it fixed the issue.” This allowed Tweetbot to temporarily avoid any service interruption, even if it put it in a semi-functional state.
As has been pointed out by Musk, iOS developers, Tweetbot probably ran into problems when it came back online because it used different API keys that put significantly lower limits on its activity. “The Twitter API restricts new apps to low limits,” Mysk explains. “All Tweetbot users now share a limit of 300 posts per 15 minutes.”
Things started to go wrong last Thursday when users noticed that they no longer had access to third-party Twitter apps, including Tweetbot, Twitterific, and the Android version of the Fenix. Despite the widespread confusion, Twitter and CEO Elon Musk have yet to publicly acknowledge the outage, nor have they reached out to developers to let them know what’s happening. Meanwhile, Twitterific and Fenix on Android remain suspended.
According to a report of Information, Twitter may have disabled third-party apps on purpose. Internal messages seen by the outlet reveal a senior software engineer saying the outage is “intentional.” Another message reportedly says that Twitter is preparing to issue statements to developers affected by the outage, though it’s unclear when that will be ready.
Update, 7:10 p.m. ET: Updated to reflect that Tweetbot is now down again.