Strange Bug Deletes Old Links And Media From Twitter

Elon Musk has been brutally rebuilding Twitter aka X since his takeover and rarely cares about the consequences. This means, among other things, that links and media from the early days of the social network no longer work or may even have been deleted.

Twitter/X users often ask themselves: bug or feature?

Elon Musk took over Twitter last fall and has made massive changes from the start. Because the new boss immediately laid off thousands of employees and that was just the beginning of various content and branding adjustments, above all the renaming to X. But after the layoffs of the employees, who of course were often also responsible for the technology, the experts always wonder again: bug or feature?

This is currently the case again: At the weekend, a user named Tom Coates noticed (via Forbes) that on X all images posted between 2011 and 2014 appear to have been deleted. Also, links published using Twitter’s internal URL shortener no longer work.

At the moment, however, it is not clear whether this is intentional or whether something broke internally again. Perhaps the most famous picture ever posted on Twitter, Ellen DeGeneres’ selfie from the 2014 Academy Awards, was briefly missing. However, this picture has been restored – possibly manually.

There are currently two theories as to why this happened: On the one hand, a problem with the URL shorter t.co is suspected, on the other hand, it could also be a memory issue. It wouldn’t be the first time that Twitter/X technically “stutters” because bills haven’t been paid or Elon Musk wants to put pressure on business partners – but is unsuccessful.

Twitter messed with Google a few months ago and didn’t want to pay the bills for the cloud servers. In any case, the social media company has not yet commented on this.