The Morning After: Twitter may have deliberately cut off third-party app access
'Third-party app suspensions are intentional,' one engineer reportedly said.
Mat Smith
·Bureau Chief, UK
Igor Bonifacic / Engadget
Twitter appears to have deliberately cut off third-party clients from accessing its API. Since Thursday evening, many of the most popular apps that scroll Twitter without going through the company's own software, including Tweetbot and Twitterrific, haven't worked, with no official communication from Twitter. On Sunday, a report from The Information featured messages from Twitter's internal Slack channels that suggested the company is aware of the outage – and is likely the cause of it. "Third-party app suspensions are intentional," reads one message in a channel the company's engineers use to fix service disruptions.
In the last 24 hours, Tweetbot briefly came back online, but then fizzled out again. Does Twitter really want us to reinstall its app or use it in our web browsers? Will this work, or will more of us just turn off Twitter entirely?
– Mat Smith
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