Nathan Coppen/Getty Images
Tweetbot, Twiterrific, Echofon, and other third-party Twitter clients have stopped working for many people as of late Thursday night, and the social network apparently hasn’t notified the developers of the apps why.
Paul Haddad, a co-creator of Tweetbot, posted Thursday at 11:10 p.m. ET on Mastodon in response to a report from technology journalist Casey Newton that multiple third-party clients failed, with “no communication about whether [it’s] a bug or…” Tweets from the official accounts of the Tweetbot and Twitterish customers confirmed their communication problems on Thursday evening. The bill for echophon posted shortly after 8:30 a.m. on Friday that it was working to fix the issues and that “Twitter hasn’t replied yet.”
Haddad told TechCrunch that the connection issues started at 10:30 p.m. Thursday, noting that all of his app’s API requests were failing. A post on Twitter’s developer forum shows that numerous Twitter-based app developers are noticing that their apps have been listed as “suspended” or show invalid authentication credentials.
Fenix for Android suspended, no communication from Twitter.
Probably an automated action, but I highly doubt I’ll hear from them again and fix the problem. pic.twitter.com/OUJtusaW2A— Matteo Villa (@mttvll) January 13, 2023
Not all third-party clients seem to be broken at this point. Ars staffers have successfully revamped data tools that retrieve Twitter data, and we heard from a user of the Tweeten client that it still works. TweetDeck, an alternative client to Twitter, appeared functional Friday morning. Third Party Customer Fenix for Android was listed as “suspended”, said developer Matteo Villa, but the iOS version was still functional.
Twitter’s uneven history with third-party clients and the company’s recent history of making unannounced changes with seemingly unexpected consequences has led to debate that this could be more of a sudden policy change than an API glitch.
Twitter flatly told developers in early 2011 to stop making client apps, changed the API to severely restrict them in mid-2012, then removed auto-refresh and push notifications in 2018. Severe layoffs at the social media network have led to many tech industry watchers to anticipate operational disruptions at the company when employees with knowledge of existing systems leave without replacement.
We were unable to reach Twitter for comment, as the PR department reportedly no longer exists. The company had yet to respond to the API outage or related issues with third-party customers as of 11 a.m. Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted at 9:06 am about changes to bookmark button placement, image cropping, and “other minor bug fixes next week.”
