Twitter outage hits third-party apps

Twitter has suffered yet another outage

Twitter suffered another outage at the weekend, and third-party applications are expected to be affected as the firm struggles to get the site back online.

The "unexpected downtime" occurred at around 6pm BST on Saturday, according to the Twitter status site. An update around 15 minutes later said that the firm was " recovering from the downtime and looking into the external causes".

However, Doug Williams, of Twitter's application programming interface (API) developer support team, said in a discussion forum that third-party apps would be affected as the firm takes the API offline.

"The issues causing the downtime require that we once again take measures to bring the site back online," he wrote. "The first step our operations team must take will likely cause API downtime, especially affecting OAuth. We apologise for the inconvenience and we will work quickly to reduce the impact to the API. "

The stability of the Twitter platform has been the subject of some debate in recent weeks, after the site fell victim to a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks which took it offline for several hours.

It also emerged recently that criminals have been using Twitter as a way to control and update botnets.

At the time of writing, several third-party apps tested by V3.co.uk, including Tweetdeck, appeared to be unaffected.