Older Twitter posts are effectively deleted by an X photo bug
Well, that’s a bummer.
X (formerly known as Twitter) has been around for a long, long time. That means there are a lot of old posts on the site, and according to a report by The Verge, many of those old posts are now down thanks to a new bug that deletes images from old tweets. In particular, the site has issues with images attached to tweets via Twitter’s URL shortener. Instead of showing images, many of these tweets now just show blank URLs.
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The tweet may have been deleted
According to The Verge, this happens to posts from before December 2014. There was some speculation over the weekend that the images might have been deleted on purpose for security reasons, but some of them have since been restored. I can personally vouch that Ellen DeGeneres’ famous Oscar selfie went missing over the weekend, but now it’s back.
The tweet may have been deleted
When asked why this happened, there’s still no definitive answer, although The Verge noted that in 2016, Twitter added a feature that prevents attachment URLs from counting towards the character limit, with metadata appearing around December 2014.
In other words, something stupid happened behind the scenes, and now a website, which may or may not have engineers, needs to figure out how to fix it. If not, a significant chunk of internet history could be lost.
