A glitch wipes out X images and links before 2014; X says it’s fixed now

The glitch wiped out X images and links prior to December 2014, including the famous Ellen DeGeneres Oscar image. The platform says it has fixed the bug now.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s X showed a problem displaying old posts before December 2014 that came with attached images and links converted through the platform’s built-in URL shortener. 

While it’s unclear when the problem started, a post by X user Tom Coates alerted users that the famous Ellen DeGeneres selfie from the Oscars in 2014 known for being ‘most retweeted ever’ was missing its image.

More vandalism from @elonmusk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. Thats - so far - almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service.



For example, here’s a search of my media tweets from before 2014. https://t.co/FU6K34oqmA

— Tom Coates (@tomcoates) August 19, 2023

While neither Elon Musk nor CEO Linda Yaccarino has addressed the problem, the picture in that post has been restored. The platform’s support account, however, mentioned that they have ‘fixed the bug’ in a post.  

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

Also Read: Elon Musk to remove ‘block’ feature on X in new update 

There are no clarifications given about the bug, its first appearance or the specific amount of time it will take for the team to resolve but the platform has been experiencing several errors ever since Musk took over.

X (Twitter) previously made changes to tweets in 2016 adding enhanced URL enrichment wherein it started to fill in additional data from linked web pages and allowed attachments that didn’t eat up a tweet’s character count. The bug appears to have wiped out tweets that didn’t have these changes.