Yahoo Finance A glitch temporarily wiped out X images and links between 2011 and 2014 — including Ellen's Oscar selfie that broke Twitter
A glitch temporarily wiped out images and links between 2011 and 2014 on Elon Musk's X.
The most famous casualty of the glitch was Ellen's Oscar selfie, which was the most reshared post on the platform in 2014.
Some images or links still seem to be inaccessible to some users, per Insider's review.
Since Friday, users of X, formerly Twitter, started noticing that many images posted on the platform between 2011 and 2014 were no longer accessible, according to various media reports.
The glitch resulted in some of the most viral moments in internet history becoming inaccessible. It also seemed to affect links posted in the same three-year period — some of which have become shortened links.
The most famous casualty was Ellen's star-studded selfie at the Oscars, posted in 2014. The post racked up over 2.8 million reshares and 2 million likes since being posted in March 2014.
On Saturday, users posted about losing access to other pieces of internet history, from pictures about the Arab Spring to posts by the K-Pop group BTS.
One of the first users to notice the outage was Tom Coates, who posted about being unable to see images from 2014 and before on Saturday afternoon. His post has been viewed over 15.2 million times on the platform.
—Tom Coates (@tomcoates) August 19, 2023
A community note — a fact-checking feature used by X users — has since been added to Coates' post stating that images from this period are still on X's servers, even if they are inaccessible in users' posts.
Before Coates, Brazilian user @DaniloTakagi posted on Friday about being unable to access images from 2014 and before.
At the time of writing, access to images and links from 2011 to 2014 — including Ellen's selfie — continued to be inconsistently available, per Insider's review.
And it wasn't just Ellen. Even images and links posted by X chairman Elon Musk before December 2014 continue to be inaccessible to some of Insider's reporters.
X first introduced image-sharing to its platform in June 2011. It remains unclear why the glitch occurred, and neither Musk nor X acknowledged the glitch since the outages began.
However, these outages come amid increasing instability on the platform. Widespread outages have been on the rise since Musk made massive job cuts to the company in October last year, Insider reported in March.
One of the most high-profile outages occurred in February when the platform became inaccessible because an employee accidentally deleted data on a key function. The team responsible for it had already left the company, Insider reported.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.
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