X Resolving Issue That Erased Twitter Photos Prior to 2014
During the weekend, numerous X users observed the sudden disappearance of older Twitter images on the platform. The company has now acknowledged that an unidentified “bug” is the cause behind this issue and is actively working on resolving it.
The problem first surfaced on Saturday, when older tweets that originally contained images began appearing as unclickable t.co URLs. X now says the bug affected “photos from before 2014,” but as The Verge previously pointed out, tweets from 2014 — including Ellen DeGeneres’ iconic Oscar selfie — were also at least temporarily affected.
The 2014 Oscar photo has since been restored, but other older tweets still appear to be missing images for now. “We fixed the bug and the issue will be fully resolved in the next few days,” X said in a statement via his support account.
Over the weekend we had a bug that prevented us from displaying images from before 2014. No images or data were lost. We fixed the bug, and the issue will be fully resolved in the coming days.
— Support (@Support) August 21, 2023
X did not respond to the request for comment or provide more information about the reason for the error. The company said it had not lost any underlying images or data. But it’s hardly the first time some part of the service has been disrupted in the past several months. The photos and links on the platform were temporarily broken in March due to API changes. The company was also recently found to be slowing down links to several competitors and other websites run by communities that Elon Musk has attacked in the past. Musk has repeatedly complained about the state of X’s infrastructure, but has also drastically cut his server budget and laid off many of the site’s reliability engineers in an effort to cut costs.
