The hasty actions of the new CEO of the recently rebranded Twitter as X have led to a significant upheaval. At this moment, finding most graphic files and videos from before 2014 on the platform may prove to be an impossible task. It turns out that due to Elon Musk’s carelessness, the entire system that allowed their display has crumbled.
The issue was brought to light on his Twitter platform by Tom Coates, who claimed (as later turned out to be incorrect) that all photos and videos from before 2014 had been “deleted” from the service.
However, the truth is that multimedia from ten years ago no longer display on the platform, and yes, this is a problem caused by Elon Musk himself. The glitch occurred after the billionaire intentionally slowed down access to competing services such as Threads, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as news outlets like The New York Times. This took place last week, and the mentioned delay lasted around 5 seconds before the redirection was activated.
The issue is that this change also affected the mechanism of shortening links to multimedia from the external service t.co, which Twitter used a decade ago. In practice, all multimedia is still on Twitter/X servers, but access to them has been severed, and they do not display correctly today. Musk acknowledged this glitch as a “letdown,” but he quickly added that “no social media platform is perfect.”
