Third-party Twitter apps like Twitterrific and Tweetbot reportedly down for many

If you can’t access Twitter from a third-party app, you aren’t alone, as it appears almost all major third-party clients for Twitter are down. The issue seems widespread and plagues many apps on mobile as well as desktop platforms.

9to5Google reports that users first started encountering the problem at 11 PM ET on January 12 when their third-party clients stopped working. While the actual cause remains unclear, the outage could be the result of Twitter APIs not working correctly for the affected apps. Popular clients like Fenix, Tweetbot, Twitterrific, and Talon are all having issues. Twitter’s official mobile client has been working fine.

As of this time, no one knows whether the outage is unintentional or a targeted attack on third-party Twitter clients. Per Twitterrific, the “root cause” remains unknown. Paul Haddad, one of the developers of Tweetbot, shared that there has been no official communication from Twitter regarding the situation. Paul also hoped that “whatever is going on at Twitter is just some automated spam protection bot that is incorrectly suspending proper apps, or something similar”.

Interestingly, it appears only full-fledged Twitter clients are experiencing issues, as services/applications that use Twitter APIs in a limited way, for instance for authentication, haven’t had any problems. Bearing this in mind, speculation is abound that Twitter may be deliberately suspending third-party clients’ access to the platform, stifling the apps in the process.

It is no secret that Elon Musk wants to drastically increase Twitter’s revenue. Assuming the outage is intentional, killing third-party Twitter apps might be a step in that direction since Twitter gets no money out of such services.

However, nothing can be said for certain as of now, since Twitter and Elon Musk have so far remained tight-lipped on the matter.

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