It is alleged that the shutdown of third-party Twitter clients was intentional. But again, no official announcements.
Twitter is said to have deliberately disabled third-party client access to its API. As of Thursday evening, many popular third-party apps that can be used to browse Twitter without using the company’s own solutions, including Tweetbot and Twitterrific, no longer work without some kind of official announcement from Twitter. This Sunday, The Information shared messages from the company’s internal Slack channels, suggesting that the latter is aware of the outage and that it is even at the source.
Disabling third-party Twitter clients is said to have been intentional
“The suspension of third-party applications is intentional,”reads one of the posts highlighted on the U.S. Blog, in a channel intended for company engineers to identify service outages. This Friday morning, a member of Twitter’s product partnership team reportedly asked his colleagues when they might have a list of “approved topics of discussion”regarding “revoking third party access.”
According to The Information, a product marketing manager reportedly responded shortly after the company “started working on communications”but was unable to provide a specific timetable for how to proceed. The information explains that it was not possible to obtain a rationale for Twitter’s actions.
But again, no official announcements
Since Elon Musk took over the reins of the company, there is no longer a communications team. Therefore, it is impossible to get an official answer. Especially since the American billionaire hasn’t tweeted anything about this outage, and the developers we owe to Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Fenix, and many other third-party clients claim to have received no feedback from Twitter. “We are in the dark just like you,” wrote Paul Haddad, co-creator of Tweetbot, in a recent post on Mastodon.