Twitter is helping to combat outages by restricting the number of times third-party apps such as TweetDeck and Echofon can access the service.
The micro-blogging service reduced the maximum number of API calls to 175 an hour, compared to the 350 per hour previously. This means many third-party apps are unable to update tweets as often as usual.
"Twitter API issues continue to affect all clients and API limits are set at a reduced level. Currently the API limit is 175 calls per hour," TweetDeck said on its support pages last week.
"This will very likely lead to 'Rate Limit Exceeded' errors in TweetDeck. We suggest ensuring that you have Allow TweetDeck to manage my Twitter API limit enabled under Settings > Twitter Updates. This should allow TweetDeck to ensure you do not run out of calls, although with such a small API limit, your refresh rates will be very slow."
TweetDeck also revealed that earlier this week some users reported the API calls had been restricted to just 75 per hour.
Yesterday, Twitter acknowledged the that many users are receiving incorrect 'Rate Limit Exceeded' errors and that it was investigating the cause.
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