Twitter's third-party apps, including Tweetbot and Echofon, have remained inaccessible through the website since Thursday, Jan. 12, and according to reports, the incident was intentional.
The disruptions, as per internal Twitter texts seen by The Information, were deliberately carried out to encourage users of competing apps to switch to Twitter's official clients.
As of Sunday morning, Jan. 15, neither Twitter's main website nor the Twitter Support account has addressed the issue, and CEO Elon Musk has stayed mute.
Rumors Surrounding Third-party Disruption
Based on PCMag's report, it has been widely speculated that Twitter disabled access to Twitteriffic, Fenix, and Talon on Android, iOS, and MacOS. The reasons were that these tools generate little to no advertising income for the social media giant and enable users to avoid ad-heavy sections like the "For You" tab.
Apparently, Tweetdeck is functioning normally throughout these outages.
Twitter provides the ability to disable the application programming interface (API) used by third-party programs. Paul Haddad, the co-founder of Tweetbot, said on Mastodon on Saturday, Jan. 14, that he has no idea if Twitter's cutoff is temporary or permanent and is waiting for an official public announcement.
"We have a large number of sub. Renewals for year 3 of Tweetbot coming up in a couple of weeks. If we're permanently cut off I need to know so we can remove the app from sale and prevent those. Which obviously I'd rather not do," Haddad remarked.
Haddad responded to a user's inquiry about why Tweetbot did not have a new API key by saying he could remotely update new keys in 5-10 minutes but chose not to because he did not want to be sued by someone with an infinite legal budget.
Also Read: Medium Announces It Will Start Using Mastodon With Its Own Community
Twitter and the Advertisers
This comes amid reports that Twitter has been pleading with advertisers to continue using the service.
Twitter reportedly told ad buyers their careers were in peril if they did not bring in more ad expenditure, as reported by The Information.
As per the report, one Twitter representative informed an advertising agency executive working for a Twitter ad client that they would immediately complain to the client about the firm's lack of commitment to restart purchasing advertisements on Twitter.
New 'For You' Page on Twitter
Last week, it was reported that the Twitter app for iOS supposedly now uses a TikTok-like algorithm by default.
It looks like the social networking app is working to provide a user experience similar to TikTok's For You page. After a challenging year, Twitter releases two new tabs that will change users' default feeds.
When opening the Twitter iOS app, users are now presented with the personalized "For You" timeline, which is generated by an algorithm. TikTok tried out this modification before being inspired by the app's automated system.
