The morning after: Twitter may have intentionally blocked access to third-party apps

It appears that Twitter has deliberately cut off third-party client access to its API. As of Thursday evening, many of the most popular apps that scroll through Twitter without going through the company’s proprietary software, including Tweetbot and Twitterrific, were down without official communication from Twitter. On Sunday, a report from The information presented messages from Slack’s internal Twitter channels that suggest the company is aware of the outage — and likely caused it. “The suspension of third-party applications is intentional,” reads one message in a channel that company engineers use to fix service outages.

In the past 24 hours, Tweetbot briefly came back online, but then went down again. Does Twitter really want us to reinstall its app or use it in our web browsers? Will this work, or will most of us just turn off Twitter entirely?

– Matt Smith

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