A glitch temporarily wiped out X images and links between 2011 and 2014 — including Ellen's Oscar selfie that broke Twitter
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Kai Xiang Teo
Aug 21, 2023, 17:13 IST
Ellen DeGeneres/AP
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.
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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 variousmedia 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.
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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.
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.
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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