Home > Explore > Older Twitter posts get effectively wiped out by X photo glitch

Older Twitter posts get effectively wiped out by X photo glitch

Knowledge2025-04-26 22:22:3787

Older Twitter posts get effectively wiped out by X photo glitch

Well, that's a bummer.

X (formerly known as Twitter) has been around for a long, long time. That means there are lots of old posts on the site, and according to a report from The Verge, many of those old posts are now functionally useless thanks to a new bug that's erasing images from old tweets. Specifically, the site is having trouble with images that were attached to tweets via Twitter's URL shortener. Instead of displaying images, a lot of those tweets are now just displaying empty URLs.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk promises to kill block function on X (Twitter)

Per The Verge, it's happening to posts from before December 2014. Over the weekend, there was some speculation that perhaps the images had been deleted on purpose as a belt-tightening move, but some of them have since been restored. I can personally vouch that the famous Ellen DeGeneres Oscars selfie was gone over the weekend, but it's back now.

Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

As for why this happened, there's no definitive answer yet, though The Verge noted that Twitter added a feature to stop attachment URLs from counting against the character limit in 2016, with metadata that appeared around December 2014.


Related Stories
  • Elon Musk promises to kill block function on X (Twitter)
  • Prosecutors have Trump's Twitter DMs and drafts
  • X/Twitter executives had a very bad day defending Musk's platform
  • X is auctioning off memorabilia from the Twitter offices. Here's what's up for grabs.
  • X, formerly Twitter, introduces 'sensitivity settings' to revive ad sales

In other words, something goofy happened behind-the-scenes and now a site that may or may not still employ engineers has to figure out how to fix it. If not, a substantial portion of internet history could go down the toilet.