Tweetbot is (mostly) working again

Tweetbot is (mostly) working again

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Tweetbot is mostly up and running after an outage locked users out of major third-party Twitter clients. While users can now sign in to Tweetbot and browse through tweets, some say they still can’t post anything to Twitter through the service without getting an error message stating they’ve reached a “data limit.”

The client isn’t back online because of anything that Twitter did, though. Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad tells The Verge that they still haven’t heard anything from Twitter, so they’ve “decided to start using new API keys and see if it fixes the problem.” This could allow Tweetbot to temporarily avoid any disruptions to the service, even if it puts it in a semi-working state.

This is a proof that #Twitter has deliberately suspended @tweetbot. The developers just created a new Twitter API app and obtained new credentials. The app works, albeit with limits. Twitter API is not broken. If a platform pushes devs to resort to such workarounds, it's doomed https://t.co/Ra4CtJo40I

— Mysk (@mysk_co) January 15, 2023

As pointed out by iOS developers Mysk, Tweetbot is likely having issues because it’s using different API keys that put significantly lower limits on its activity. “Twitter API restricts new apps to low limits,” Mysk explains. “All Tweetbot users now share a limit of 300 posts per 15 minutes.”

Things started breaking last Thursday when users noticed that they no longer had access to third-party Twitter apps, including Tweetbot, Twitterific, and the Android version of Fenix. Despite widespread confusion, Twitter and CEO Elon Musk have yet to acknowledge the outage publicly, nor have they reached out to developers to let them know what’s going on. Meanwhile, Twitterific and Fenix on Android are still suspended.

According to a report from The Information, Twitter may have disabled third-party apps purposefully. Internal messages viewed by the outlet reveal a senior software engineer saying that the outage is “intentional.” Another message reportedly says Twitter’s getting ready to issue statements to developers affected by the outage, although it’s unclear when that’ll be ready.