Twitter users get a dose of the old days as Twitter API fails

The new wave of Twitter users got a dose of Twitter past today as the Twitter API failed, blocking access to third party Twitter clients.

As of 4pm PST, there is no official word from Twitter about the issue, with both the official Twitter account, and Twitter status page indicating their are no problems, although Twitter itself has been lit up with users discussing the issue (although naturally not via their Twitter clients.)

Twitter was once so well known for its downtime that many use to joke the only news worth reporting was that Twitter was up. This changed last year as the company got serious about its backend support, and took on new staff and funding to fix the issues.

Twitter 12 months later is, as some reports have claimed, over 1000% more popular than this time last year. Twitter has become mainstream, with everybody from politicians, celebrities, through to the general masses embracing the hottest service in town. How they’ll react is anyone’s guess, but we do know roughly is that only between 25-30% use Twitter directly, so that’s 70% odd of users who are (at the time of writing) cut off from Twitter via their favorite apps.

We’ll update the post if we hear more.

Update: as of 4:40pm PST, third party support seems to have returned. Twitter are claiming the issue was related to logins. To reconnect, shut down then restart your Twitter client, or if you’re on an iPhone or similar, log out then log in again.