This is a great point, and this isn't just about Twitter but also about many other sites and services that seem to depend on it. It looks like a lot of people have created a distributed system version of dependency hell for themselves, where they rely on a multitude of third parties not to change behaviour or go down. Additionally, in many cases and perhaps perfectly legitimately from a cost-benefit perspective, the envisaged way to recover from this kind of problem is to assume that people can quickly and frantically hack their way out of it at short notice.