Twitter API Outage is Currently Breaking Third-Party Clients
- Laurent Giret
- Jan 13, 2023
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A Twitter API outage yesterday evening has made many third-party Twitter clients unusable. Neither Twitter nor its CEO Elon Musk have communicated about the outage, so it’s not clear yet if the situation is temporary or if Twitter is actually trying to push all users to use its own apps.
As of this writing, popular Twitter clients such as Tweetbot or Twitterific are being affected by the outage, though your mileage may vary. The Twitterrific Mac app is apparently still working, and other Twitter clients such as Fenix 2 or Albatross may still be working for some users according to The Verge.
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Tweetbot and other clients are experiencing problems logging in to Twitter. We’ve reached out to Twitter for more details, but haven’t heard back.
We’re hoping this is just a temporary glitch and will let you know more as soon as we know more.
— Tweetbot by Tapbots (@tweetbot) January 13, 2023
TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned client for power users is currently working as usual. I’ve also managed to make the TweetDeck-based Tweeten work on the web, but I’m currently seeing login issues on the Tweeten desktop app.
Paul Haddad, one of the creators of the Tweetbot client posted on Mastodon that it was difficult to get more information from Twitter right now. After the company laid off over half of its workforce last fall, it no longer has a communications department.
“I’m hoping that whatever is going on at Twitter is just some automated spam protection bot that is incorrectly suspending proper apps, or something similar. Unfortunately I don’t have many contacts at Twitter anymore so doubt I’ll get any kind of definitive answer soon,” Haddad posted.
Third-party clients have been really important in the almost two decades old history of Twitter. An app like TweetDeck used to be a third-party client before it was acquired by Twitter back in 2011. Twitter power users usually rely on third-party clients to get a more customizable UI and a real-time feed with no ads or algorithmic recommendations.
If you use third-party Twitter clients, let us know in the comments how you’ve been adjusting to this Twitter API outage today.