Hmmm, I’m having exactly the same problem.
Coincidentally it started happening around the same time yours started failing.
We are working on a research project for the Amsterdam municipality and the Dutch Police force. Sampling geo-tagged public tweets from the basic sample stream.
It’s been working fine for a few weeks, and we saw a pretty consistent rate of around 50 tweets per second. All of a sudden any attempt to connect results in 420.
I tried creating a new application key. That worked, but with the new key we are getting very very few items streamed to us. Like one per second with occasional spikes back to the usual rate we were seeing.
I tried contacting twitter via the policy request form, but received an auto response asking me to contact data sales. We don’t need the firehose right now as we are still in the research phase, we just need it to work as it was working using the sample stream.
I’ll try creating a new account later and see if that fixes the issue, but it is worrying why it would just change like this. We haven’t seen any rate limit notifications according to our logs.
I’m wondering if something has been changed on the server side, since I notice some downtime logged in the last couple of days in the twitter api uptime dashboard
