When I woke up today, my favorite Twitter app, Tweetbot, claimed that my credentials were invalid. Fearing my account might have been hijacked, I did some sleuthing and found out that the issue wasn’t nearly as dire as I initially thought. Instead, it appears that the Twitter API is down.
I could imagine that this is a strategic decision to force folks to use the official Twitter apps, which recently were updated so that users saw promoted and advertised posts instead of just seeing their timelines by default. That would certainly be good for Twitters ad revenue stream. However, I suspect that this actually is just a garden-variety outage due to a flawed update or a failed server. As Robert J. Hanlon famously said, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
We should know for certain what happened in a few hours or days. If this was a deliberate change of strategy to disable third-party apps, we can expect a lot of new blog posts about it and a new round of Twitter user defections.