\n<\/p>\n
Some third-party Twitter clients such as Twitterific and Tweetbot appear to be experiencing an outage, though the cause is currently unclear. Developers haven\u2019t received any communication from the company about whether the issue is caused by a bug or something else, according to a Mastodon post<\/a> from Paul Haddad, one of Tweetbot\u2019s creators.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s been speculation<\/a> from Twitter<\/a> users<\/a> and some news outlets<\/a> that this is a move from Twitter to shut down third-party clients altogether. However, the outage may not be universal. Some apps, like Fenix 2 or Albatross, appear to be working for me and some others<\/a>, though I have seen other users report problems with Fenix. The first-party Twitter app is also still functional. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Third-party apps rely on Twitter\u2019s API to get data from the service, a point that\u2019s been contentious in the past<\/a> as the company went through a period where it neglected tools for outside developers. That appeared to be turning around before Elon Musk bought the company, though where he stands on alternative Twitter apps isn\u2019t clear; he doesn\u2019t appear to have said much positive or negative about them. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s hard to tell whether the third-party client outage is due to the API. Attempting certain calls from my individual Twitter developer account seemed to work, while Twitter\u2019s own API explorer tool<\/a> is currently broken. Many of the error messages seem by users refer to issues with authentication.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At time of writing, there haven\u2019t been any tweets about the apparent outage, either from the official Twitter account<\/a>, the Twitter Support account<\/a>, or Elon Musk<\/a>. The company doesn\u2019t have a communications department that we could ask about the issue directly, so we\u2019ll keep an eye out for any developments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n