Twitter glitch wipes out millions of photos and links from tweets – here’s how to check
If you’ve had your X (formerly Twitter) account for more than nine years, you might want to check on your old tweets.
Users have noticed that photos and links posted to the platform before December 2014 have been taken out and replaced by dead URLs.
A famous example is the Oscars selfie posted by Ellen DeGeneres in March 2014, which vanished from her tweet, although it has since reappeared.
It’s unclear if it’s an accident due to a technical trouble at X or a deliberate cost-cutting exercise to ease the demand of company servers.
Musk is yet to address the issue, although he admitted in a post on Saturday that X ‘may fail’ – shortly after saying he’ll remove the block feature.
The famous Oscars selfie posted by Ellen DeGeneres in March 2014 vanished from the tweet, although it has since reappeared
Elon Musk has been slammed for ‘more vandalism’ of X, formerly known as Twitter, although it may be just temporary technical trouble
If you’ve only joined X in the last 8.5 years, this fresh issue won’t affect you.
But if you’ve been a long-time user and have posted tweets of your treasured photos, it might be worth checking if they’re still there.
To search for your own tweets from before December 2014, type into the Twitter search bar the following: ‘From:[your username] until:2014-01-01’.
By doing this, MailOnline found that some images were still appearing in tweets from before December 2014, but took screenshots in case their days are numbered.
It’s also worth downloading your Twitter archive, which lets you save tweets and all the media within them.
X’s newest problem affects posts containing images but also any hyperlinks converted through Twitter’s built-in URL shortener (t.co), according to the Verge.
Tweets themselves are displaying, but it’s the content within them that’s having problems being displayed properly.
Billionaire Elon Musk (pictured) took over as Twitter owner in October 2022 – and changed its name to X in July
Content appears as URLs, but these can’t be clicked on, and copying and pasting them into another search bar only takes you back to the original tweet.
X user Tom Coates, who detailed the issue in a string of posts, called it ‘more vandalism’ from the Twitter owner and ‘another cost-saving exercise’.
‘Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014,’ he said.
‘That’s – so far – almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service.
‘Every image and video removed and replaced with a dead link.’
In a message tacked on below Coates’ first post, X said the missing images ‘are still saved on Twitter/X’s servers’ but that the links are broken ‘at the moment’.
Regardless of this, Coates pointed out that the images ‘are still effectively deleted from the public internet’.
It’s unclear if Musk’s team is planning to restore the images to the tweets; MailOnline has contacted the firm for more information.
In a message, X said the missing images ‘are still saved on Twitter/X’s servers’ but that the links are broken ‘at the moment’
Elon Musk admits X (formerly known as Twitter) ‘may fail’ just as he’s criticised for ‘more vandalism’
It’s possible it’s just more temporary technical trouble from the firm, which has experienced outages thought to be due to tweaks to the site by developers.
Outages have been a fixture ever since Musk began running Twitter, leading to speculation that there aren’t enough staff to fix its problems.
It comes as the billionaire owner admitted in a surprisingly honest message at the weekend that X ‘may fail’.
On Saturday he posted: The sad truth is that there are no great “social networks” right now.
‘We may fail, as so many have predicted, but we will try our best to make there be at least one.’
Musk recently caused a backlash by stating his intention to remove the ability to ‘block’ other users across X, excluding private direct messages.
If enforced, it could means users have to contend with more harassment and the consequences of more unregulated free speech.
While it remains unclear if Musk will follow through on disabling the block feature, many users on the platform pleaded with the billionaire to reconsider.
‘Block is a critical peace of mind issue for many people because it generally gets the cyber stalkers to move on,’ one X user said.
Musk took over Twitter in October and has just changed its name to X as part of plans to turn it into what he’s described as an ‘everything’ app.
A shiny ‘X’ logo was installed at the platform’s headquarters in San Francisco before being removed due to complaints from local residents.