X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014::Ellen’s famous ‘most retweeted’ selfie from the 2014 Oscars has had its image restored, but most old tweets have broken short links instead of the media or links that should be there.

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[–] 445 points 3 years ago (5 children)

Twitter, X, or whatever it’s currently called, did not respond to requests for comment.

The Verge is fed up lol

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  • [–] 99 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I figure they would at least mention the poop emoji auto reply.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 years ago (1 child)
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    [–] 187 points 3 years ago (2 children)
  • [–] 162 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Time to cut some storage costs!

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  • [–] 90 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    This is exactly it. It also wouldn’t surprise me if certain accounts had images from then that might get request by law enforcement that are now “oops all gone!”

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    [–] 114 points 3 years ago (11 children)

    Is anyone still on twitter? Why?

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  • [–] 60 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    Momentum. It's still the most popular platform for many niches and it will stay popular as long as it's popular....

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I haven’t deleted my account - it’s 17 years old! But I also haven’t posted in a couple months other than saying I’ve moved to Mastodon. I said I’d hold on to the bitter end & I will. I’m not leaving, they’ll have to evict me.

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    [–] 101 points 3 years ago

    Haha, "glitch" about $10 million dollars in storage fee was cleared.

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  • [–] 99 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Not a glitch. Costs less to dump the data than maintain it, plus a lot of cringey Musk tweets were in there.

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  • [–] 38 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    The images are still available through direct links. The t.co redirects are broken.

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  • [–] 89 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Anyone still using Twitter is a top tier masochist. It was always a pretty shit platform, but it's being made fun of by the toilet and the dumpster now for how shitty it is.

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    [+] 76 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 24 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    It's more that finally it starts to show how stupid firing most of the staff was

    Most people in tech anticipated it to run fine for a while but then eventually stuff like this will show up more often because you don't have people that actually understand the code anymore and which kind of side-effects to think about with changes

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    To zoom out even more: It's just one more incident showing how fragile investor-sustained digital information systems are.

    Every website that came before the current crop of mega-scale privacy-invading behemoths also failed, and took down all their user data and history with them. Why would anyone expect Twitter to be any different?

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  • [–] 22 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    Doubleplusgoof

    Edit: leaving my typo because it amuses me

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago*

    Man, if it wasn't a typo I'd think you're a fucking genius, that's a really witty one

    I'm gonna steal that for all the times fascists go "oops, looks like I accidentally further fucked up society, wow I'm so clumsy haha totally accidental"

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Eh. This is on us. URL shorteners and Twitter in particular have always been scarily brittle and opaque,. With nobody actively maintaining the data, why would you think that it would be around forever?

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  • [–] 53 points 3 years ago

    put someone in the server room with an axe and they could do less damage than Elon

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  • [–] 43 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    3-2-1 Rule:
    3 copies of the data.
    2 Different media types.
    1 of those off-site.

    If you're relying on Twitter as the only place you have an image you care about, you're making a bad choice.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I don't think anybody seriously used twitter as storage.

    Rather the point is that, similarly to every time a blogging platform or another online service with user content shuts down, a bit of internet history disappears with it. Links are broken, traces of opinions or bits of knowledge from another time are not available anymore...

    It's not the end of the world, and at that point I wouldn't really care if twitter disappeared completely overnight, but still, some stuff will be lost.

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    [–] 38 points 3 years ago
    [–] 35 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    I am kinda without words, need to check if one of my favorite post are still up. The poet was made by a trans women before she knew she was trans. She was sitting in a boat and said I feel like a girl in a 90s movie. She quote posted it recently and said we made it girlie.

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    [+] 34 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)
    [–] 28 points 3 years ago (1 child)
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    [–] [B] 23 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    It’s unclear when the problem started, but it was highlighted on Saturday afternoon in a post by Tom Coates, and a Brazilian vtuber, @DaniloTakagi, had pointed it out a couple of days earlier.

    As it is, it appears to affect tweets published prior to December 2014, judging by posts visible on my own account.

    On Saturday afternoon, as Coates pointed out, the glitch claimed the picture from one of the most famous tweets ever (back when they were still called tweets), this selfie posted by 2014 Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres flanked by celebs like Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and others, taken during the show’s broadcast.

    I haven’t seen any public comments from owner Elon Musk or X CEO Linda Yaccarino about the problem, but at some point on Saturday night / early Sunday morning, the picture in that post was restored.

    Despite speculation that it could be an intentional cost-cutting move by Musk, the fact that the actual media posted hasn’t been deleted suggests an error or bug of some kind, one of many that have arisen since last year’s takeover and mass layoffs.

    There’s also at least one other old tweeted image that still worked — the one posted to President Barack Obama’s account after winning his 2012 campaign for reelection, showing a hug between him and the First Lady.


    The original article contains 394 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 44%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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    [–] 15 points 3 years ago

    Trying to decide if I care enough to check my account that I started in like 2009 and haven't looked at since probably 2012. After everything that has happened I almost feel like it would be impressive if it still existed.

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  • [+] 13 points 3 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
    [–] 11 points 3 years ago

    This is comical

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