In the wake of this disruption, Twitter had been mum on the issue — until today. In a blog post on the subject, Biz Stone tries to mollify the rumblings of discontent with a brief explanation and assurance that OAuth will be back later today, and now better than ever before.
If you're unfamiliar with OAuth, it's an open protocol that supports the secure exchange of authorization information between two applications, such that end-users don't need to provide their username and password to third-party applications. In the case of Twitter, that means that apps using OAuth wouldn't be able to access or store sensitive account information on their servers. The bottom line is that you'd be able use Twitter apps with a better sense of security.
According to the post, Twitter "received word from the folks at OAuth that they were looking closely at a security issue within the protocol. We take security seriously and felt the responsible thing to do was temporarily disable OAuth while this matter was sorted out. Yahoo and others made similar decisions."
Unfortunately for developers (and their application's users), they were left in the dark as to why OAuth had suddenly been disabled. The post goes on to state, "The developers working on Twitter projects that are in our beta test group felt this disruption the hardest and their patience is extremely appreciated."