Nathan Coppen/Getty Photographs
Tweetbot, Twiterrific, Echofon, and different third-party Twitter purchasers have didn’t work for many individuals since late Thursday night time, and the social community has seemingly not notified the apps’ builders as to why.
Paul Haddad, a co-creator of Tweetbot, posted on Mastodon at 11:10 pm ET Thursday in reply to a put up from tech journalist Casey Newton that a number of third-party purchasers had been failing, with “no communication as to if [it’s] a bug or …” Tweets from the official accounts of the Tweetbot and Twitteriffic purchasers on Thursday night time confirmed their communication points. The account for Echofon posted shortly after 8:30 am Friday that it was working to resolve its points and that “Twitter has not but replied.”
Haddad instructed TechCrunch that the connection points began at 10:30 pm on Thursday and famous that each one API requests from his app had been failing. A put up on Twitter’s builders discussion board exhibits quite a few Twitter-based app builders noting that their apps have been listed as “suspended” or displaying invalid authentication credentials.
Fenix for Android suspended, no communication in any respect from Twitter.
In all probability an automatic motion, however I doubt very a lot I will heard from them once more and be capable to resolve the difficulty. pic.twitter.com/OUJtusaW2A— Matteo Villa (@mttvll) January 13, 2023
Not all third-party purchasers look like damaged for the time being. Ars staffers efficiently refreshed information instruments that pull in Twitter information, and we heard from a person of the Tweeten consumer that it’s nonetheless functioning. TweetDeck, an alternate consumer owned by Twitter, appeared useful Friday morning. Third-party consumer Fenix for Android was listed as “suspended,” in keeping with developer Matteo Villa, however its iOS model was nonetheless useful.
Twitter’s uneven historical past with third-party purchasers and the corporate’s current historical past of constructing unannounced modifications with seemingly surprising penalties has spurred dialogue that this could possibly be extra of a sudden coverage shift than an API glitch.
Twitter outright instructed builders to cease making consumer apps in early 2011, modified its API to severely prohibit them in mid-2012, after which eliminated auto-refresh and push notifications in 2018. Heavy layoffs on the social media community have led many tech business watchers to anticipate operational failures on the firm as employees with information of present programs depart with out alternative.
We couldn’t attain Twitter for remark, as its public relations division reportedly not exists. The corporate had but to touch upon the API outage or associated third-party consumer points as of 11 am. Twitter proprietor Elon Musk tweeted at 9:06 am about modifications to the bookmark button placement, picture cropping, and “different minor bug fixes subsequent week.”
