Twitter May Be Intentionally Killing Off Third-Party Apps

Twitter may be deliberately killing off its third-party apps after all.

The microblogging platform's employees are reportedly aware of the outage the platform's third-party apps are experiencing and that it is intentionally doing so for an unknown reason.

The outage started sometime in the evening of Jan. 12, according to The Verge, with the developers of many of Twitter's popular third-party apps announcing they were having problems logging in to Twitter.

Twitter Third-Party App 'Deliberate' Cut-Off Details

According to the message of a Senior software engineer from the company's internal Slack channel revealed by The Information's report, the outages are intentional but did not state why it is happening.

However, a closer inspection of Twitter's internal messages seems to suggest that the company is likely aware of what is causing the outage in the first place but has yet to reveal it to the public, per Engadget.

Despite that, there may be some changes that could come soon. One employee on Twitter's product partnerships team allegedly asked

when their team could expect a list of "approved talking points" related to "3party clients revoked access" in response to the complaints about the outage.

One of Twitter's product marketing managers reportedly replied that the company has "started to work on comms," but they aren't sure when the information regarding the outages will be ready to share with developers.

You may remember that Twitter has been operating without a communications team sometime after Elon Musk's takeover of the company in late October 2022 due to layoffs or resignations.

As a result of this loss, Twitter's third-party app developers have yet to be notified of what's happening. Because of this lack of communication, Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad posted on his Mastodon account that he is going to continue operating as if the outage was done on purpose. He also mentioned in a separate statement that he really wants an official public statement regarding the matter to remove Tweetbot from sale and prevent subscribers from renewing their subscriptions soon.

Haddad eventually used an unused API Key to make Tweetbot work again, an event which The Verge reported on. However, Tweetbot and the unused API key were put down again with another outage.

This outage convinced Haddad that the currently experienced outage by all Twitter third-party developers and users was intentional and that they are specifically targeted.

Why Kill Off Third-Party Apps?

Although The Big Twit himself, Elon Musk, has yet to say anything negative or positive about Twitter's third-party apps, he does have reasons to cut third-party apps off their API access.

Twitter's lack of profitability and the company's focus on making Twitter Blue work, which has its own client, maybe the primary reasons why Musk caused the outage intentionally. There is also the fact that third-party apps often don't show ads, meaning that Twitter may not be earning enough from third-party apps to justify their existence on the platform.