The tracking of social media's most damning digital evidence of media gaffes, the deleted tweet, just suffered a major setback as Politwoops has been cut off by Twitter.

Politwoops, which bills itself as "the only comprehensive collection of deleted tweets by U.S. politicians that offers a window into what they hoped you didn't see," no longer has access to Twitter's API, effectively crippling its ability to automatically track and then expose deleted tweets.

Launched in 2012 by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization designed to make politicians more accountable to the public, Politwoops posted a message on Friday notifying users that its service was experiencing problems.

"The U.S. version of Politwoops is sadly enduring an outage that's causing a lack of new deletions on the site," read the message, adding that its team was "still closely tracking politicians to include on the site."

At the time, Politwoops didn't appear to know the cause of its service outage, but the reason became clear on Wednesday when Twitter gave a statement to Gawker explaining its decision to cut the service off from its API:

Earlier today we spoke to the Sunlight Foundation, to tell them we will not restore Twitter API access for their Politwoops site. We strongly support Sunlight’s mission of increasing transparency in politics and using civic tech and open data to hold government accountable to constituents, but preserving deleted Tweets violates our developer agreement. Honoring the expectation of user privacy for all accounts is a priority for us, whether the user is anonymous or a member of Congress.

It's unclear why Twitter has decided to enforce the developer agreement rules with regard to Politwoops now, after years of allowing it to operate freely, but the decision comes at an interesting time for the company.

On the same day, one of Twitter's most high-profile and vocal investors, Chris Sacca, posted an 8,500-word screed in which he laid out his dissatisfaction with the company's service offerings and overall direction.

The cut off of Politwoops also comes at a particularly crucial time for political wonks, as the 2016 presidential election campaigns are just beginning to gain steam. Whether the move by Twitter is a bid to own the Twitter-based political discourse over the next year or truly just a developer guidelines issue, many people have already taken to Twitter to voice their displeasure with the decision.

I wonder if @twitter received a "donation" to single-handedly shut down Politwoops. Otherwise, it really doesn't make any sense. — Josh Lockhart (@codeguy) June 4, 2015

Makes sense that Twitter would enforce its API rules, but Politwoops is the kind of thing we lose when platforms have a single chokepoint. — Parker Higgins (@xor) June 3, 2015