Twitter may have deliberately cut off third-party clients like Tweetbot

Twitter appears to have deliberately cut off third-party clients from accessing its API. Since Thursday evening, many of the most popular apps you can use to scroll Twitter without going through the company’s own software, including Tweetbot and Twitterrific, have not worked, with no official communication from Twitter. On Sunday, The Information shared messages from Twitter’s internal Slack channels that suggest the company is aware of the outage and likely the cause of it as well.

“Third-party app suspensions are intentional,” reads one message seen by the outlet in a channel the company’s engineers use to triage service disruptions. On Friday morning, one employee on Twitter’s product partnerships team reportedly asked when their team could expect a list of “approved talking points” related to “3party clients revoked access.” Per The Information, a product marketing manager told their co-worker that same morning that the company had “started to work on comms,” but could not offer a timeline for when those would be ready. The Information notes it could not learn the reasoning behind Twitter’s actions.

Twitter did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request. It has not operated a communications department since Elon Musk started downsizing the company’s workforce. Musk has also not tweeted about the outage, and the developers of Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Fenix and other third-party clients say they’ve not heard anything from the company. “We’re in the dark just as much as you are,” wrote Paul Haddad, the co-creator of Tweetbot in a recent Mastodon post.