The Twitter API has stopped working, killing the vast majority of third-party Twitter clients.
If you are using a third-party Twitter client, such as Tweetbot, Fenix, Flamingo, or any other similar app instead of the official Twitter app, you’ve probably experienced issues accessing the social network recently.
If so, know that you are not alone. just as they have alerted several users In the social network itself, the Twitter API that this type of application uses to be able to distribute content has not been available for several hours.
It is speculated that the movement could have been orchestrated by Twitter in order to intentionally “break” third-party applications allowing access to the social network, and thus trick users into using the official client. For the moment, from Twitter, they have not ruled on the matter.
Third-party Twitter clients stop working… and it’s unclear if it’s a bug
Tweetbot, Twitterific, Fenix, Flamingo or Albatross are some of the third-party clients that provide access to Twitter bypassing the restrictions imposed by the official application of the social network, and which also add functions that are not available in the version original. Only Tweetdeck and clients derived from this tool seem to continue to function normally.
All of them have stopped working in the past few hours due to API connection issues.
There are indications that suggest the “downfall” could be the result of a decision by the company itself led by Elon Musk. Over the past few days, changes have been made aimed at increasing user revenue through measures such as forcing users to see more ads. Since Twitter does not derive revenue from users who use third-party clients, it cannot be excluded that it has decided to cut its losses with this type of application.
Tweetbot and other clients are having trouble connecting to Twitter. We reached out to Twitter for more details, but got no response.
We hope this is only a temporary issue and we will update you as soon as we know more.
— Tweetbot par Tapbots (@tweetbot) January 13, 2023
And it is that, as we have learned, other applications that use the Twitter API, but are not third-party clients, continue to function normally. Therefore, the belief that Twitter could have vetoed the exploitation of third-party clients is starting to grow stronger.
In any case, neither Elon Musk nor any other member of the company spoke about it. We will update this article as soon as we have any news.
