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“The company assured no images were lost.”
Over the weekend, a significant number of X users discovered that older Twitter images had mysteriously vanished from the platform. Following these reports, X has now confirmed that the issue is attributed to an unspecified “bug” and the company is actively working on resolving it.
The problem initially arose on Saturday when older tweets containing images were no longer clickable and were instead displayed as t.co URLs. X has disclosed that the bug specifically impacted “images from before 2014,” as The Verge had previously highlighted, even including tweets from 2014, such as the renowned Oscars selfie by Ellen DeGeneres. However, the 2014 Oscars photo has since been restored, while other older tweets still appear to have missing images for the time being. X released a statement through its support account stating, “We have rectified the bug, and the issue will be completely resolved in the next few days.”
Despite requests for comment, X did not provide any further information about the bug’s cause. The company emphasized that it did not lose the underlying images or data. Nevertheless, this is not the first instance of disruption on the platform in recent months. In March, there was a brief outage of photos and links due to API changes. Moreover, X has recently faced criticism for deliberately slowing down links to various competitors and websites associated with entities Elon Musk has publicly feuded with. Musk has repeatedly voiced his dissatisfaction with X’s infrastructure, leading to significant budget cuts for servers and layoffs of site reliability engineers as part of cost reduction measures.