Some third-party Twitter clients, such as Twitterific and Tweetbot, appear to be out of order, although the cause is currently unclear. Developers have not received any word from the company as to whether the problem is caused by a bug or something else, according to a Mastodon post by Paul Haddad, one of the creators of Tweetbot.
There has been speculation from Twitter users and some news channels that this is a move by Twitter to completely shut down external customers. However, the malfunction may not be universal. Some apps like Fenix 2 or Albatross seem to work for me and some others, although I’ve seen other users report problems with Fenix. The first-party Twitter app still works, too.
Third-party apps rely on Twitter’s API to get data from the service, a point that has been moot in the past when the company went through a period where it neglected tools for third-party developers. That seemed to change before Elon Musk bought the company, but where he stands on alternative Twitter apps isn’t clear; he doesn’t seem to have said much positive or negative about them.
It’s hard to tell if the remote client outage is due to the API. Trying certain calls from my individual Twitter developer account seemed to work Twitter’s own API explorer tool is currently broken. Many of the error messages seem to refer to authentication issues by users.
At the time of writing, there are also no tweets about the apparent outage of the official Twitter accountthe Twitter support accountor Elon Musk. The company does not have a communications department that we can ask directly about the problem, so we are monitoring developments.
