Twitter: latest application platform problems solved

The technical problems that affected the performance and availability of third-party Twitter applications in recent days have been fixed, the micro-blogging and social networking company said Monday evening.

"We have made some great progress today in tuning the system to a point that should allow our partners to operate as they were before the recent issue began," wrote Ryan Sarver, a member of Twitter application platform support team in a discussion forum for Twitter developers.

The latest problems with the Twitter application platform started on Saturday afternoon, when the Twitter Web site suffered an unexpected outage.

The measures the company took to restore the service affected the API (application programming interface) and other functionality that third-party applications need to access Twitter data and services, it said.

Twitter didn't detail those measures and has not offered a technical explanation of the problem.

Although Twitter is confident the issue is resolved, it is asking external developers to check that their applications are functioning normally.

If they're not, Twitter wants developers to submit a problem report, along with information like the IP address of the machine making requests to the API, the IP address of the machine they're contacting in the Twitter cluster and the Twitter API URL they're requesting, among other things.

"If you don't provide at least some of the additional information we will not be able to help you, so please do some leg work and help us help you," Sarver wrote.

It has been rough recently for developers who have built applications for the Twitter platform.

A week and a half ago, the company came under fire from a distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attack and the defensive measures Twitter implemented had a severe effect on many external applications for several days.

"Over the past ten days we have been dealing with a lot of stress on our network and that has caused a number of our partners to be knocked offline for extended periods of time. This is obviously not something we want to happen, and the platform and [operations] teams have been working hard throughout that time to address the needs of our ecosystem while protecting the system as a whole," Sarver wrote.

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