Twitter deliberately suspended Tweetbot and other third-party apps, forcing people to use the platform's official app, report says

• Twitter revoked access from third-party apps on purpose, The Information reported, citing messages.
• Access to Twitter from Tweetbot was blocked on Thursday and was still cut off on Monday.

Elon Musk's Twitter intentionally cut off access to Tweetbot and other third-party apps last week, The Information reported, citing internal messages.

As a result, people were unable to use Twitter on external apps, meaning they would have to log in to Twitter's app, per the report.

The suspension started on Thursday night and access to Twitter from Tweetbot was still blocked on Monday at time of writing, according to a message on the platform, reviewed by Insider.

The Information reported there was speculation that Twitter could have suspended the apps because they failed to bump up ad revenue. Musk predicted that by 2028, advertising would generate $12 billion in revenue, The New York Times reported.

"Third-party app suspensions are intentional," a senior software engineer wrote on Thursday in an internal Twitter Slack channel, The Information reported.

Twitter staff have discussed when the suspension would be announced to the public, per The Information's review of internal messages. One employee asked when Twitter would provide a list of "approved talking points" for partners of third-party clients who had been suspended, The Information reported.

Twitter had started to work on communications but didn't know when it would release the information, a product marketing manager said in reply to the Slack message, cited in the report.

When opening Tweetbot, a message about service disruption popped up, saying access to Twitter from its platform failed to work since 7:30 pm PT on Thursday.

"We've reached out to Twitter for more details, but as of yet have not heard anything back," Tweetbot said in the message seen by Insider, adding that it hoped the suspension was temporary.

Paul Haddad, cofounder of Tweetbot, posted on Mastodon to express his frustration over a lack of communication from Twitter about the incident.

"If you are going to kill people off, own it. Don't just do it and act like nothing has happened," Haddad said.

Twitter didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment made outside of normal US operating hours.

Are you a Tweetbot user? What do you think about this? Get in touch with this reporter at kduffy@insider.com, kate.duffy01@protonmail.com or DM on Twitter. She also has Signal.