Twitter is blocking third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterrific

Elon does what he does (makes Twitter worse). Credit: Mashable Illustration / Bob Al-Greene

Well, I hope you don’t want to use just about any major third-party clients on Twitter, because Elon Musk appears to have blocked them from accessing Twitter’s API for some reason. According to internal Slack messages viewed by The Information, the social media platform intentionally suspended those third-party apps. In one post, a senior software engineer literally says: “Third-party app suspensions are intentional.”

The third-party Twitter clients have been broken since at least Thursday evening, and developers say they still don’t have any kind of update, according to the Verge. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mashable.

Since Thursday evening, users have been complaining that they couldn’t use Tweetbot, Twitterrific, and other apps you can use to scroll through Twitter without going directly through Twitter’s software.

Tweetbot and other clients are experiencing problems logging in to Twitter. We’ve reached out to Twitter for more details, but haven’t heard back.

We’re hoping this is just a temporary glitch and will let you know more as soon as we know more.

— Tweetbot by Tapbots (@tweetbot) January 13, 2023

We still don’t have any news from Twitter.

We are honored that so many of you have chosen us as the way to browse Twitter for the past 12+ years and hope it can continue.

In the meantime, we have been working on something else…https://t.co/Pf48gPa7Ll pic.twitter.com/gR6OK5mlup

— Tapbots (@tapbots) January 13, 2023

SCOOP: Twitter intentionally suspended Tweetbot and other third-party apps, per internal Slack messages viewed by The Information. https://t.co/IngyJnFGBZ

— Erin Woo (@erinkwoo) January 14, 2023

In the 36 hours since users started reporting outages, there has been no communication from @Twitter, @TwitterSupport or Elon himself, leaving developers like Tweetbot creator Paul Haddad in the dark. pic.twitter.com/dPZUyTLq7U

— Erin Woo (@erinkwoo) January 14, 2023

On Sunday Twitterrific tweeted: “There’s still no official word about what’s going on. We apologize for the ongoing interruption.”

But, as with anything Musk is doing at Twitter, it isn’t particularly thorough. Some apps — like Albatross and Fenix — still work for some people while others don’t, depending on if you’re using it on iOS or Android, the Verge reported. It’s all, unsurprisingly, messy.