Syrinx Login Issue
As many of the beta testers know, Wednesday night (~10:30pm EST), the Syrinx beta would no longer login to Twitter, or more accurately it could no longer call the verify_credentials method from Twitter.
While deploying other fixes, the API folks at Twitter discovered a loophole that some were using to circumvent the Rate Limit. This involved modifying how the verify_credentials method could be called. The Syrinx beta, among many other twitter programs were caught completely off guard by this.
Ordinarily the Twitter API team gives reasonable notification before changes occur, but this time they did not and things broke. There seems to have been a lot of heartburn over this and the Twitter API team has sent out emails claiming that they will work harder in the future to notify developers at least 5 days before public API changes except for necessary security and performance issues.
Compounding the impact of this error, I was at my day job for 12 hours, so Syrinx was crippled for an extended period of time.
It’s all fixed now and hopefully with more transparency from Twitter in the future these types of outages can be avoided. I’d like to thank everyone for their patience and understanding in this issue.