Tweetbot, Third-Party Twitter Tool, Faces Outage Again

Several people recently complained of being unable to use third-party Twitter apps.

Tweetbot is a popular third-party app that offers easy access to several features of Twitter.

Source : Tweetbot/Tapbots

Third-party Twitter tool Tweetbot is down again. The Twitter client briefly became available during an outage that prevented users from using major third-party Twitter clients. While some users said that they were not able to post anything to Twitter through the service without getting an error message saying that they have reached a "data limit", some said that they can't sign in at all, as per media reports.

"And now dead again, along with some old unused API keys, which proves that this was intentional and we and others were specifically targeted," Paul Haddad, co-creator of Tweetbot, wrote on Mastodon.

"I wouldn't have swapped out the keys in the first place if there was even a shred of communication," Haddad added.

Tweetbot had not heard anything from Twitter, so it decided to start using new API keys and see if it fixes the problem, Haddad explained.

This allowed Tweetbot to temporarily prevent any service interruptions, even though it put the service in a partially functional condition.

"Twitter API restricts new apps to low limits," iOS developer Mysk explained on Twitter.

"All Tweetbot users now share a limit of 300 posts per 15 minutes," Mysk added.

Last week, Twitter CEO Elon Musk had said that the micro-blogging platform's "open source" algorithm would be revealed next month, as several people were unable to use third-party Twitter apps and faced issues with logging and accessing feeds.

"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," posted Tweetbot by Tapbots.

Meanwhile, Twitter has denied a data leak that apparently hit 200 million of its users and their information was being sold online. The data hack that resulted in 200 million names and email IDs of Twitter users was not a result of a security bug on the micro-blogging platform's systems, Twitter has said.

"We take our responsibility to protect your privacy very seriously. In response to recent media reports of Twitter users' data being sold online, we conducted a thorough investigation and there is no evidence that data recently being sold was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems. We also want to share an update about an incident that took place earlier this year, and provide transparency into the steps we took to remediate it," Twitter wrote in a blog post last week.

(With inputs from IANS)