Twitter quietly switches off HTTP connections to API

In case you have not found yourself on Twitter’s dev site recently, the social network recently switched all its API traffic to require an SSL connection.

A notice on dev.twitter.com and a banner along the top of the site were the only notices that I saw, that everything you know about APIs and Twitter was about to change. Frankly, it was easy to miss if you hadn’t felt the need to poke around Twitter’s dev docs.

To compound the confusion, when a script now attempts to connect to Twitter’s API using a HTTP connection without SSL, all that is returned by the API is a “403: Forbidden” error.

For most use cases and frameworks, the change should only need to be adding a boolean flag or hitting the API with an https prefix instead of http.