Twitter deletes all user photos and links from 2011-2014.
Twitter, the social media platform formally known as X, appears to have deleted all images posted between 2011 and 2014.
Links that were shortened using Twitter’s native service are also broken.
It’s unclear whether this was an intentional act or an error, but whatever is going on is causing concern among users who have been using the site for over a decade.
On Saturday, user Tom Coates tweeted about the photo deletions, which quickly went viral.
Twitter’s link-shortening domain—the new URL that Twitter generates to track user activity—appears to be the likely culprit behind why images no longer display and links no longer work.
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Twitter was founded in 2006, but native image uploads were not supported until the summer of 2011.
Several image-hosting services, such as TwitPic, sprung up to support Twitter, but that service closed down in 2014, and many images from those early days are lost.
However, images that were directly posted to Twitter from 2011 to 2014 appear to be in jeopardy as well, as they are no longer loading on the site.
Some users on the Reddit forum Datahoarder, which tracks data preservation in the internet age, speculate that Twitter broke something while attempting to migrate the site to X.com, which Twitter owner Elon Musk has held for several years.
However, that is only a logical guess at this point and has not been confirmed.
Another popular theory is that Twitter is trying to save money on image hosting fees, which has yet to be confirmed by anyone at Twitter.
As Twitter deletes all user photos and links from 2011-2014, the deletion of photos could have been an error, and those old images could be restored at some point.
But, whether by accident or design, it’s safe to say that Twitter isn’t getting any more stable over time.
With the amount of misinformation that has flooded the site since the Maui fires, it’s clear that the site is no longer a reliable source of news.
And, sadly, there is currently no popular global alternative capable of replacing what was once a vital website.
