A new report from 9to5Mac tells of Twitter’s acquisition of Smyte, a San Francisco-based tech company that specializes in protecting users from online spam, abuse, and fraud. Twitter immediately shut the service down, with Smyte’s customers left in the lurch.
Twitter announced the acquisition on Thursday, but didn’t mention that they were immediately deactivating the service.
Today, we’re very excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire Smyte, a San Francisco-based technology company that specializes in safety, spam, and security issues. Smyte’s team, technology and company mission are aligned with our focus on improving the health of conversation on Twitter, and we believe this will be a powerful addition to our ongoing work.
A common practice among companies that acquire smaller ones is to keep it running for at least a short period of time, so current contracts, subscriptions and such can be honored.
Twitter’s purchase of Smyte makes sense, as it helps them deal with issues they’ve faced since day one. However, the immediate discontinuation of the service makes little sense.
However,TechCrunch reported Thursday night that Smythe had disabled API access for its clients, with little notice.
According to reports from those affected, Smyte disabled access to its API with very little warning to clients, and without giving them time to prepare. Customers got a phone call, and then – boom – the service was gone. Clients had multi-year contracts in some cases.
Twitter declined to comment, but we understand it was making phone calls to affected Smyte customers today to match them with new service providers.
As you can imagine, this was somewhat of a surprise to Smyte’s clients, which include Indiegogo, GoFundMe, TaskRabbit, Zendesk, and other companies.