Instagram Hits 80 Million Users, Loses Access To Part Of Twitter API

Instagram, the social photo-sharing site that Facebook bought earlier this year for about $1 billion, says that it’s now crossed the 80-million-user level. That user base has also shared nearly four billion photos, the company says.

But those users will find a slightly less functional mobile app when they upgrade to the latest version.

As TechCrunch is reporting, the “Find Friends” tool no longer supports Twitter. A user clicking the button to find friends via Twitter gets a pop-up message that, according to TechCrunch’s screenshot, says:

Unable to Find Friends

Twitter no longer allows its users to access this information in Instagram via the Twitter API. We apologize for any inconvenience.

It’s unclear why Twitter would turn off Instagram’s API access for this feature. TechCrunch reports that API access is still available for Instagram’s “Tweet Photo” feature.

Twitter has promised to tighten is API access rules, and removing the ability to auto-publish tweets to LinkedIn was one casualty of that decision.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for clarification on this, but have not had a reply yet. We’ll update this article if/when we learn more.

Postscript: Twitter has issued this statement in response to our inquiry:

We understand that there’s great value associated with Twitter’s follow graph data, and we can confirm that it is no longer available within Instagram.