The past few weeks since Elon Musk’s takeover have seen Twitter in turmoil as the platform underwent rapid changes, and tonight it appears something happened to the Twitter API, with Tweetbot and many third-party Twitter clients down.
Around 11:00 PM ET this evening, many Twitter users noticed that their third-party clients were throwing back error messages related to the Twitter API. This widespread outage occurs across all third-party apps, including Twitterrific, Fenix, Talon, and many others on Android and iOS, as well as macOS. Tweetbot is also affected by the API outage, but Tweetdeck thankfully appears to be unaffected.
Whether this is a temporary outage or a deliberate decision by Twitter is still unknown, as the company has yet to make an official statement.
However, Twitter is likely to kill its third-party clients. These clients generally don’t bring any advertising revenue to the platform, something Musk has made clear is a priority in his position so far. Just this week a report from Information revealed is taking desperate measures to keep ad buyers on board, and many Twitter users have noted significant increases in the number of ads and the frequency of ads appearing on the platform. Also on Twitter recently forced users on iOS to view the “For You” tab by default, rather than the “Followed” tab, which shows which accounts they actually follow.
Another piece of evidence that points to this being a deliberate decision on Twitter’s part is the apps that use the API but aren’t full clients. apparently it still works. These are only replacements for broken official Twitter apps.
Details aren’t entirely clear right now, but we’ll update our coverage as more information becomes available.
Twitterrific acknowledged the problem but did not provide further details.
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