Many historical tweets posted before December 2014 on XElon Musk’s social network, formerly known as Twitter, they suddenly lost attached images and original links due to what appears to be an internal glitch.
The problem arose over the weekend when users noticed old tweets, just short “t.co” links instead of the images or links they were supposed to contain. Tweets with attached videos or YouTube links are not affected, likely because support for these formats was only added after 2014.
X missing photos and links from historical tweets
Among the historical tweets affected was the famous “Oscars selfie” taken by host Ellen DeGeneres with a group of celebrities during the 2014 ceremony. The post became the most retweeted tweet in the platform’s history, with the image first disappearing from the tweet (still remaining on the X servers) and then mysteriously reappeared in the early hours of Sunday. It is not yet clear when exactly the problem started: some users reported problems already in the middle of the week, but the bug appeared only at the weekend, after Tweets by Tom Coates which speaks of “Another Elon Musk vandalism”.
Reason for is technical in nature and refers to the 2016 update.when Twitter introduced “advanced URL enrichment” to show previews of related sites and attachments so as not to break the 140 character limit for individual tweets. According to the official documentation, the metadata for these features has been available since December 2014, but that’s a guess: X hasn’t made any official announcement about the issue yet.
The company is going through a turbulent period following the cuts and changes made by Elon Musk, and users of the platform fear that the error is due to the new CEO’s ambiguous leadership, even if the time seems to indicate a pre-existing technical problem. Pending clarification, users are trying to save historical tweets by taking screenshots or uploading their account information, but as this is a glitch that has affected and still seems to affect many tweets, this is only a partial fix.