In the early days of Twitter, when it started to become popular, there was a more than interesting explosion of products and services offered by third-party companies, but directly related to the social network. Many were somewhat ephemeral, some because their utility was questionable, others because they didn’t have a profitable business model, and others because as it evolved, the social network began to incorporate the features they provided. Those were interesting times, indeed.

However, from those early days, something that has survived to this day and is in very good health are third-party clients, i.e. apps or services that you can use to access and manage your Twitter account. There are many reasons to use applications or services of this type, such as the ability to schedule publications, manage multiple accounts at the same time, integrate other features and services from other third parties… in short, the list is quite long and yes, indeed, this makes them especially useful for social media professionals.

If possible, what is even more interesting is that many of them allow you to manage profiles from other social networks at the same time. That way, if a community manager manages a company’s accounts on four or five networks, they can do it from one control center, consolidate messages, check replies to posts on all networks at a glance, and so on.

For this reason, when these apps stopped accessing the service at the end of this week, many experts threw their hands behind their heads and after wondering what was happening, many concluded that it must be related to the shortage of engineers that the company is experiencing after successive batches of massive layoffs carried out by Elon Musk. “Something must have broken and no one knows how to fix it” could be summed up as the most common opinion.

However, and as we can read in The Information, blocking third-party apps from accessing the Twitter API is intentional, as posted by an engineer on company Slack. So far, there has been no official statement in this regard, either from the Twitter accounts (remember that Elon Musk fired all the communication teams) or from Musk himself, despite the fact that he is always very dedicated to posting tweets. the social network and the changes that are taking place.

So now the big question is whether this block is temporary, either because of technical adjustments, or because the social network is considering adjusting the legal conditions of its use, or, more worryingly, that the new CEO, who, despite promising to do so, not yet resigned, he decided that he wanted Twitter accounts to be usable only directly through his official clients and web interface.