Twitter stops working for third-party clients, users and developers don’t know if its a bug or policy issue

Many individuals have reported issues with Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Echofon, and other third-party Twitter clients since late Thursday night as it appears that Twitter has not informed the creators of the apps about the issue.

The co-creator of Tweetbot, Paul Haddad, responded to a post by tech writer Casey Newton on Mastodon at 11:10 PM, ET on Thursday, saying that some third-party clients were having problems but that there had been no word on whether the problems were due to a bug or an amended policy.

Tweets from the official accounts of the Tweetbot and Twitterrific clients on Thursday night confirmed their communication issues. The account for Echofon posted shortly after 8:30 am Friday that it was working to resolve its issues.

Meanwhile, Twitter has not responded to either the queries raised by neither users, nor developers. Interestingly, Twitter doesn’t have a communications or public relations department any more either for the press nor for other stakeholders as Musk sacked the entire department during the first round of Twitter layoffs.

On Thursday around 10:30 PM, the connection problems began, and all API queries from various third-party apps failed. Several Twitter-based app developers have noted that their applications have been classified as “suspended” or displayed incorrect login credentials in a post on Twitter’s developers forum.

Not all third-party clients appear to be broken. Third-party apps that process Twitter’s data for users to determine engagement and Tweetdeck an alternative client owned by Twitter, appeared to be functional.

There has been speculation that this may be more of a sudden policy move than an API bug because of Twitter’s patchy experience with third-party clients and the company’s recent history of making changes without warning that had seemingly unanticipated effects.

Early in 2011, Twitter explicitly requested that developers cease creating client applications; in the middle of 2012, it modified its API to severely restrict them; and finally, in 2018, it abolished auto-refresh and push alerts. Heavy layoffs at the social media network have caused many tech industry experts to fear operational issues at the firm as personnel with the expertise of existing systems go without a replacement.

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