Some third-party Twitter clients, such as Twitterific and Tweetbot, appear to be experiencing an outage, although the cause is currently unclear. The developers have not received any communication from the company on whether the problem is due to a bug or something else, according to a behemoth stand by Paul Haddad, one of the creators of Tweetbot.
Has been speculation of Twitter users Y some news media that this is a move by Twitter to shut down third-party clients entirely. However, the interrupt may not be universal. Some apps like Fenix 2 or Albatross seem to work for me and some others, although I have seen other users report problems with Fenix. The own Twitter application also continues to work.
Third-party apps rely on Twitter’s API to pull data from the service, a point that has been contentious in the past, as the company went through a period of neglecting tools for third-party developers. That seemed to be changing before Elon Musk bought the company, though it’s unclear where he stands on alternative Twitter apps; he doesn’t seem to have said much positive or negative about them.
It’s hard to tell if the third-party client outage is due to the API. Attempting certain calls from my individual Twitter developer account seemed to work, whereas Twitter’s own API explorer tool it is currently broken. Many of the user error messages seem to refer to problems with authentication.
At the time of writing, there have been no tweets about the apparent outage, either from the official Twitter accountthe Twitter support accounteither Elon Musk. The company does not have a communications department that we can ask directly about the problem, so we will be attentive to any developments.
