Twitter API stopped returning results for international characters containing spaces or underscore as of Nov 11 2016!

[hkattab]

Why Twitter API stopped returning search results for international characters containing spaces or underscore as of Nov,11 2016?
Both REST and Streaming API’s have been working fine for the past 3 years, but it suddenly stopped on Nov 11, 2016

The original search string is

“زين الاردن"OR"زين_الاردن”

and we encode it to become

%22%D8%B2%D9%8A%D9%86%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%AF%D9%86%22OR%22%D8%B2%D9%8A%D9%86%5F%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%AF%D9%86%22

[andypiper]

I assume the date here is incorrect since that is in the future

I’m not familiar with any change to the API that would cause this. I just ran that query against the search/tweets endpoint and it seems to return results. Is this specific to just that / those strings?

[hkattab]

You are absolutely right in two things, the date was wrong (Oct not Nov) and the API was returning the data correctly, a domino effect in our code caused this issue as we rely on the since_id, this gave us an impression that the API was returning any data.
Thank you Andy Piper for prompt feedback

[andypiper]