Twitter Admits that They Blocked a Number of Third-party Applications, Tweetbot and Twitterific are Included

Tweetbot is a victim of Twitter's new policy. (photo: Twitter @tappbot)

JAKARTA- Twitter confirmed that they deliberately blocked third-party applications such as Tweetbot and Twitterific after several days of silence. In a post on Twitter, the company wrote that it "enforces legacy API rules," which "may cause some apps to crash."

While the statement confirmed suspicions that Twitter was intentionally locking users out of third-party Twitter clients, it didn't even contain a link to the rules Twitter was referring to and still didn't tell the public anything about what actually happened. This is the first time Twitter has acknowledged the issue since the app started crashing Thursday January 12th.

Twitter's obscurity isn't all that surprising, considering the company dismantled its communications team as part of Twitter CEO Elon Musk's mass layoffs. A senior Twitter engineer reportedly told employees the third-party outage was "intentional" but never explained why. This was revealed from an internal message obtained by The Information.

This situation has left the developers, who make their living from this app, and the users, who use it to enhance their Twitter experience, frustrated and confused.

While one app, Tweetbot, briefly returned online over the weekend, that was only because co-creator Paul Haddad swapped his API keys. This puts the app in a semi-working state and allows it to temporarily bypass the ban.

Other Twitter clients, such as the iOS versions of Albatross and Fenix, continue to work, and again it's completely unclear what these apps do that Tweetbot and Twitterific might not. It looks like Twitter isn't communicating with the developer on this issue either.

"We still haven't heard anything from anyone at Twitter at any level," Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad told The Verge. “If there is an old rule that we have unknowingly violated over the last 10+ years, we want to know about it so, where possible, we can comply with it.”

The Verge has reached out to Twitter seeking comment but did not receive an immediate reply.