In the last few weeks since Elon Musk took over, Twitter has been in turmoil with rapid changes to the platform, and tonight it looks like something is going on with the Twitter API, with Tweetbot and several third-party Twitter clients down.
Around 11pm ET today, many Twitter users noticed that third-party clients were throwing back error messages related to the Twitter API. This widespread glitch occurs across all third-party apps, including Twitterrific, Fenix, Talon, and many others on Android, iOS, and MacOS. Tweetbot was also affected by the API outage, but Tweetdeck, thankfully, was not.
It remains to be seen whether this is a temporary outage or a deliberate decision by Twitter as the company has not given any official explanation yet.
However, Twitter is likely to kill third-party clients. These clients generally don’t bring in advertising revenue for the platform, which Musk has made clear has been his priority so far. This week only Report from information Revealed Intensive measures to keep ad buyers on board, and many Twitter users have noted a huge increase in the number and frequency of ads they see on the platform. Twitter recently forced users on iOS to see the “For You” tab by default instead of the “Following” tab that shows what accounts they follow.
Another piece of evidence points to the fact that apps that use the API but aren’t full clients are a deliberate decision on Twitter’s part. Still seems to work. These are only replacements for broken official Twitter apps.
Details are sketchy at this time, but we’ll update our coverage as more information becomes available.
Twitterrific acknowledges the problem, but doesn’t offer much insight.
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