Elon Musk’s Twitter (now known as X) is going great! After news broke that a glitch caused most of the platform’s content from 2014 and before to be scrubbed, the company released an update claiming that the bug has been zapped.
This weekend, Musk’s X borked the system and accidentally wiped access to built-in links and photos from Tweets prior to December 2014. As The Verge notes, this includes, for example, that famous selfie of Ellen Degeneres, Bradley Cooper, Lupita Ny’ongo, and others at the 2014 Oscars in replies. Now, X has released an update to inform us that the issue has been resolved. According to the company’s statement posted yesterday to the platform, no data was actually deleted and the bug just kept that data from being displayed properly. Affected links and images should be back to normal in the coming days.
“Over the weekend we had a bug that prevented us from displaying images from before 2014,” X Support tweeted yesterday evening. “No images or data were lost. We fixed the bug, and the issue will be fully resolved in the coming days.”
X user Tom Coates noticed the bug this past Saturday. A follow-up tweet from Coates illustrates just how dystopian his feed of pre-2014 tweets with no images actually looks. While X Support did not disclose the cause of the bug, it’s likely that it dug itself into the platform’s URL-shortening software.
X did not immediately return Gizmodo’s request for comment on the bug.
The bug, while apparently fixed, is very indicative of the whack-a-mole of problems that Musk’s X has been dealing with—some of which are the brainchild of the tech billionaire himself. Musk has reportedly reduced traffic to news outlets that have written poorly about him, like The New York Times and Reuters, as well as competitors like Threads, Facebook, and Bluesky. Speaking of competitors, last Spring, platform users noticed that they were unable to post, retweet, or reply to tweets that had a link to Substack.
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