Twitter announced Thursday that it had acquired Smyte, a startup that was geared to supply anti-harassment tools to better address prominent issues relating to spam, abuse, and security issues. While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Smyte had previously raised $6.3 million in funding from top venture firms including Y Combinator, Baseline Ventures, and Founder Collective.

During an unexpected turn of events, Twitter shut-down access to Smyte’s API almost immediately, without prior warning to existing customers. This shut-down left most consumers no time to transition to a new service provider.

According to Smyte’s website, the company’s customers included TaskRabbit, Musical.ly, OLX, Zendesk, GoFundMe, IndieGoGo, npm, 99 Designs, among other name brands.

Through an initial exchange with TechCrunch that occurred after the acquisition, Twitter had shared plans to wind down Smyte’s business with existing clients but provided no indication that relations between several companies would be immediately cut outright.

According to statements from various companies who utilized Smyte’s tools, some received a warning before the API was disabled, but were granted no time to prepare for the end result. Some clients reportedly held multi-year contracts that were cut, while others merely received a phone call before their service was cut entirely moments later, according to TechCrunch.

The decision comes, ironically, following a recent update to Twitter’s online harassment policies. Smythe was geared to utilize their solutions to stop unwanted online behavior, avoid phishing, fake accounts, spam, and various other anomalies that plague Twitter feeds. The customer data scientists were working toward deploying their own custom machine learning models to counteract these outliers swiftly and directly.

Twitter is reportedly handling the matters on a case-by-case basis.