Tweetdeck down: Major Twitter client not working amid chaos on site

Elon Musk has made sweeping changes apparently aimed at stopping data collection by bots

(PA) (PA Archive)

TweetDeck, a major Twitter client, has stopped working properly.

The app is seemingly a victim of the same problems that have meant that Twitter has not been loading properly in recent days.

Over the weekend, Twitter owner Elon Musk announced that the site would be limiting the number of posts that users could see. He indicated that the change was meant to stop bots scraping the tweets posted on the platform, though some have suggested that the problem could have other causes.

The site also cut off the ability to read tweets without a login. The changes were described as a “temporary emergency measure” by Mr Musk, who said that bots on the platform had degraded the user experience.

It has plunged the site into chaos as users look to deal with the ration on the number of posts, as well as a number of apparently linked problems.

One of those issues is that TweetDeck is failing to work properly. Some reported that the app was unable to load tweets at all, while others found that they might initially show and then disappear, or that specific columns were not working.

TweetDeck is a power user tool that is used by companies to manage multiple accounts, and by those who look to follow updates on the site through its columns and other tools. While a relatively small number of people may use the site, that includes some of those who post and follow prolifically.

It is unclear whether the outage is linked to either the restrictions on the number of posts, or removing the option to view posts without being logged in. Experts have suggested that both changes appear to have been made in a rushed and haphazard way, and so might have accidentally broken other parts of the site.

TweetDeck does not have an official status account. While Mr Musk has been giving ongoing updates on the situation on the main Twitter site in recent days, he has not mentioned the outage on TweetDeck.

The app has been largely neglected for years. The last major announcement was that the TweetDeck Mac app would be closed down, in June 2022, before Mr Musk took over the site.

In the time since, Mr Musk has made changes that have taken other third-party clients offline. Though TweetDeck was founded as an independent service, it has since been bought by and integrated into Twitter, presumably meaning it was able to avoid those initial problems in accessing Twitter’s data.

Some rumours have also suggested that TweetDeck could become paid-for, or part of Twitter’s premium “Blue” offering. But the company has offered few official updates on its future at all.