San Francisco, Jan 16 (IANS): Third-party Twitter tool Tweetbot is down again. The Twitter client briefly became available during an outage that prevented users from using major third-party Twitter clients.

While some users said that they were not able to post anything to Twitter through the service without getting an error message saying that they have reached a "data limit", some said that they can't sign in at all, reports The Verge.

"And now dead again, along with some old unused API keys, which proves that this was intentional and we and others were specifically targeted," Paul Haddad, co-creator of Tweetbot, wrote on Mastodon.

"I wouldn't have swapped out the keys in the first place if there was even a shred of communication," Haddad added.

Tweetbot had not heard anything from Twitter, so it acedecided to start using new API keys and see if it fixes the problem, Haddad explained.

This allowed Tweetbot to temporarily prevent any service interruptions, even though it put the service in a partially functional condition.

"Twitter API restricts new apps to low limits," iOS developers Mysk explained on Twitter.

"All Tweetbot users now share a limit of 300 posts per 15 minutes," Mysk added.

Last week, Twitter CEO Elon Musk had said that the micro-blogging platform's "open source" algorithm would be revealed next month, as several people were unable to use third-party Twitter apps and faced issues with logging and accessing feeds.

"Tweetbot and other clients are experiencing problems logging in to Twitter. We've reached out to Twitter for more details, but haven't heard back," posted Tweetbot by Tapbots.