Over the weekend, it was circulating that a bug is affecting old tweets on Twitter. After a thorough investigation, it was discovered that posts predating December 2014 containing images and links shortened by Twitter were affected. Twitter is owned by Elon Musk, who acquired it for $44 billion last September. CEO Elon Musk said, “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, which will be fully resolved in the coming days.”
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
On Sunday, many users complained that tweets people posted before December 2014 were not visible. All media posted before 2014 should be removed from Twitter. Nearly a decade’s worth of links, images, and films from the early 2000s were removed from the service, according to a post on X.com by Tom Coates. Additionally, DeGeneres’ selfie from the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony in the audience with stars Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence was not included in her tweet. Later, DeGeneres’ tweet’s image was fixed, but a response revealed that not everyone had that privilege.
This issue was brought to notice by Tom Coates’ piece, which states that even the famous Ellen DeGeneres selfie from the 2014 Oscars, regarded as the “most retweeted ever,” was missing its accompanying image. It is still unclear about the bug, when it starts happening, and how long it will take to resolve the issue. By investigating and looking into the issue, it is observed that only earlier posts were affected by the bug. This happened in response to the changes made by Twitter in 2016 when it used metadata on tweets from December 2014 onwards to fill in additional data from linked pages and permit attachments that did not eat up the tweet’s character count.
It has also been speculated that it was an error caused by trying to switch the company’s domain from Twitter.com to X.com. All we know is that for a while there, it featured many old tweets that Stephen A. Smith made
TAke a look, y'all: IMG_4346.jpeg
— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) May 27, 2015
It has been observed that most of the deleted images and links were removed at the same time that Twitter allowed “enhanced URL enrichment” back in 2016. The HTML title and description in the Tweet payload in this improved version, along with operators for matching them. On Tuesday, Elon Musk said, “We exceeded 346 billion user-seconds today.” Elon Musk also brought attention and said, “Apart from a spike a few months ago where multiple LLM companies tried to download our entire database simultaneously.” Encouraging a journalist to post on X, he stated, “If you’re a journalist who wants more freedom to write and a higher income, then publish directly on this platform!”
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