Twitter platform issues affecting Open Berkeley widget

July 6, 2023

As you may have seen in various news reports, Twitter has been having issues since the weekend, and Down Detector is still showing ongoing issues reported by many.

Twitter has applied rate limits to logged-in users (limiting the number of tweets they can view per day), and has also prevented anyone not logged into a Twitter account from viewing any tweets.

The Open Berkeley Twitter widget simply displays the output of the appropriate Twitter timeline in the visitor’s browser, which means its display is dependent on whatever Twitter restrictions are in effect based on whether your visitor is logged in to Twitter or has reached their rate limit. Unfortunately, there is nothing you or our team can do to ensure that your visitors see your tweets displayed in the widget.

In the short term, you might want to temporarily remove any Twitter widgets from your Open Berkeley site until the Twitter issues have been resolved and they hopefully restore public viewing of Twitter timelines.

If the Twitter issues persist without proper resolution, we may need to deprecate the Open Berkeley widget that displays Twitter timelines. If this is necessary, you would still be able to link to your own Twitter timelines via the Social Media options, or an external link you create yourself.

Because we are currently focusing on development of our next-generation platform, we will not be developing additional social media widgets. You can always link to any social media accounts as described above. Please note that social media platforms may have privacy concerns that violate campus privacy policy, or accessibility issues that do not meet our campus accessibility requirements.