Twitter has experienced turmoil in recent weeks since Elon Musk’s takeover, and tonight, it appears something is going on with the Twitter API as Tweetbot and many third-party Twitter clients are down. Around 11pm ET this evening, many Twitter users noticed that third-party clients, including Twitterrific, Fenix, Talon, and many others on both Android and iOS, as well as macOS, were throwing back error messages related to the Twitter API. Tweetbot is also affected by the API outage, but Tweetdeck appears unaffected. Whether this is a temporary outage or an intentional decision by Twitter remains to be seen, as the company has issued no official explanation at this time.
It stands to reason that it is possible Twitter may be killing off third-party clients as they generally do not bring any ad revenue for the platform, something that Musk has made clear is a priority in his tenure so far. Just this week, a report from The Information revealed desperate measures to keep ad buyers on board, and many Twitter users have noted major increases in the number of ads and frequency of ads seen on the platform. Twitter also recently forced users on iOS to view the “For You” tab by default rather than the “Following” tab that actually shows what accounts they are following.
Another piece of evidence pointing to this being an intentional decision on Twitter’s part would be that apps that use the Twitter API but are not full clients appear to still be working. It’s only replacements for official Twitter apps that are broken. The company has not provided any Twitter API documentation or statement about the status of the API. Some users are using tools like Twint to access their account and others are using alternative fonts like Fira Code to access their account. It remains unclear what Twitter’s mission statement or Twitter Pixel has to do with this issue. Details remain largely unclear at this point in time, but we’ll update our coverage as more information becomes available.