Tweetbot Back Down, It's Possible That Twitter Deliberates Third-Party Applications

Tweetbot is back down again and temporarily inaccessible to its users. (photo: tweetbot)

JAKARTA - Tweetbot is down again and temporarily cannot be accessed by its users. This Twitter client was made available briefly after an outage that locked users out of third-party Twitter clients.

While users can log into Tweetbot and browse tweets, some say they can't post anything to Twitter via the service without getting an error message stating they've reached a "data limit." But now the user says they can't login at all.

“And now dead again, along with several old unused API keys, which proves this was intentional and that we and others were specifically targeted,” Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad wrote on Mastodon. "I won't exchange the keys if there's even the slightest bit of communication."

The client isn't back online because of whatever Twitter does. Haddad told The Verge that they hadn't heard anything from Twitter, so they decided to start using the new API key and see if that fixed the problem. This allows Tweetbot to temporarily avoid any disruption to the service, even if it puts it in a semi-functional state.

As iOS developer Mysk points out, Tweetbot may have issues getting back online because it uses a different API key which significantly limits its activity. “Twitter API limits new applications to a low limit,” Mysk said. “All Tweetbot users now share a limit of 300 posts per 15 minutes.”

Things started to break down last Thursday January 2 when users noticed they no longer had access to third-party Twitter apps, including the Android versions of Tweetbot, Twitterific, and Fenix. Despite the widespread confusion, Twitter and CEO Elon Musk have yet to publicly acknowledge the outage. They also haven't contacted the developers to let them know what's going on. Meanwhile, Twitterific and Fenix ​​on Android are still suspended.

According to a report from The Information, Twitter may have intentionally disabled third-party apps. Internal messages seen by the outlet reveal a senior software engineer saying the outage was "intentional".

Another message was reported saying Twitter was preparing to issue a statement to developers affected by the outage, though it was unclear when that would be ready.