X is on a roll with changes to the Twitter platform. Completely obliterating the Twitter branding throughout the site and related services, while making many other changes it sees fit in the process. Some of these changes have apparently led to what the company (X) calls a “glitch”, which saw all images being deleted in tweets dated before December 2014.
And it doesn’t just stop there as the glitch had also broken most of the links within these tweets. Resulting in links that led to a 404 page on Twitter (X), led right back to the tweet itself, or changed to broadly link to the root domain name of whatever site the links were originally pointed to (instead of a specific page on that site).
This means that images were dropped and many links turned broken from millions of tweets. Something that didn’t take long for users to spot. Leading to many tweets (and posts within other networks) relating to the event/change.
Some went as far as claiming that it was another attempt by the company to cut back. As cutting images from millions of tweets could (absolutely) result in an incredible savings when it comes to storage and bandwidth. Something that you could easily see a company try to pull off by shaving off older posts like that. However, these tweets were eventually tagged by Twitter’s fact-checking system, with a message claiming that the images have not been deleted from the server and that they were simply broken within the tweets themselves. Linking to a famous picture of Ellen DeGeneres at the 2014 Oscars as an example.
In which case, wouldn’t save them storage if all of the images are still hiding in the backend somewhere, but still could potentially save them a lot of bandwidth when these tweets are loaded/displayed by millions of users across the world.
So as users claim it was a strategic move to save money, the company replies to the public calling it a glitch. Meanwhile, the images are still (at the time of writing this) missing from these tweets and many of the links still broken in their various ways.
The sad truth is that there are no great “social networks” right now.
We may fail, as so many have predicted, but we will try our best to make there be at least one.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 19, 2023
