Twitter confirms locking out third-party apps from accessing platform

Recall there was outrage on Friday last week as users who access Twitter through some of the third-party apps complained over the sudden loss of access to their Twitter accounts.

There were rumors of an anomaly in Twitter’s API while some others hinted the API may have suffered a bug attack but Twitter’s silence on the issue raised fears the platform may have been responsible for the shutdown.

Twitter, in a post shared on its Twitter Dev handle for developers on Tuesday, said: “Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules. That may result in some apps not working.”

The platform, however, failed to give more details about some of the API rules that were flouted by the third-party app developers.

While this is seen as one of the major upsets users have witnessed since billionaire, Elon Musk took over the blue app, this sudden action is yet to be fully understood as it has left millions of users confused about why Twitter took the action.

According to The Information, it earlier spotted internal messages from Twitter which seem to confirm suspicions that the action was an intentional one - a move to stop a referral of some sort of its users to those third-party apps and instead, force them to come on the Twitter app directly as the platform does not earn money from advertising on third party clients.

Some of the third-party apps have replied Twitter hoping to get more information on the development.

One of the affected apps, Tapbots, developer of Tweetbot, in its reply said “Tweetbot has been around for over 10 years, we’ve always complied with the Twitter API rules. If there’s some existing rule that we need to comply with, we’d be happy to do so, if possible. But we do need to know what it is…@TwitterDev, you know how to reach us.”