LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Twitter, now known as X, has gone through a series of changes since Elon Musk took over as the new CEO in October 2022.
The 52-year-old business tycoon made the coveted blue tick pay-to-use, imposed a restriction on the number of posts non-verified users could view, and recently announced plans to turn X into an everything app.
However, the micro-blogging platform recently encountered a significant technical glitch that led to the deletion of images and links posted on the platform between 2011 and 2014, according to The Verge.
Did a glitch delete Ellen DeGeneres's iconic 2014 Oscar selfie?
The glitch also erased one of Twitter’s most viral photos: Ellen DeGeneres’ iconic Oscar selfie. The selfie featuring, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and many other Hollywood stars, was shared in 2014 when the American comedian and producer hosted the Academy Awards presentation.
The iconic picture generated over 2.8 million retweets and earned its place as the most retweeted post in history.
According to Indy 100, the image vanished as a result of an update to the social media platform that shortened t.co links used to share images.
It’s unclear when the glitch started but it was discovered on Saturday by tech journalist Tom Coates, who noted that "all media posted before 2014" had been deleted from Twitter/X.
“More vandalism from @elonmusk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. That's - so far - almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service,” Coates noted in a series of tweets.
Deletion of Ellen DeGeneres' 2014 Oscar selfie leaves Internet fuming
The erasure of DeGeneres's iconic 2014 Oscar selfie garnered immense social media attention, with many users slamming Musk for the glitch.
"Why remove our ability to see our posts, memories, and literal historical events from Twitter? With no warning at all," one user fumed, while a second user said, “Guaranteed this is to save on storage costs.”
"This is a good reminder that we should all download our Twitter data, especially because I think it's very, very likely that our old DM history is just gonna vanish out of nowhere one day like what happened to Reddit earlier this year," a third user commented.
“I can’t even be snarky about this. This is just tremendously sad and only the beginning of what Twitter’s slow cringe death means for the greater internet,” a fourth user said.
“Well, that’s a vast amount of Internet history that’s just been lit on fire without warning by that pompous, idiot sh*tlord,” another wrote.
As of now, neither Musk nor X CEO Linda Yaccarino has revealed the reason behind the glitch or even acknowledged the issue.
The issue of disappearing media comes after Musk followed up on comments he made back in May that users “blocking public posts” on his social media network “makes no sense,” and that the tool “needs to be deprecated” and replaced with “a stronger form of mute.”
