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Sunday
Aug202023

What happened to Ellen’s Oscar selfie? A glitch on X explained

Iconic selfie is restored but look at the reply link (t.co link) that doesn't work anymore

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, is experiencing a glitch that prevents old posts with images or shortened links from displaying properly. The issue was brought to light by Tom Coates on Saturday afternoon and had been noticed by a Brazilian vtuber, @DaniloTakagi, a few days earlier. The glitch seems to affect posts made before December 2014. Videos don't seem to be affected since X added native image support in 2011 and built-in videos in 2016, but links to YouTube and other sites are now broken and show only t.co URLs. 

One of the most famous posts ever affected by the glitch was this selfie taken by Ellen DeGeneres during the 2014 Oscars, featuring celebrities like Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and others. It was the "most retweeted ever," with over two million shares on the platform. Neither owner Elon Musk nor X CEO Linda Yaccarino has commented publicly on the problem, but the picture in that post was restored sometime on Saturday night / early Sunday morning. Some speculated that the glitch could be a deliberate move by Musk to save costs, but the fact that the media files are still intact suggests an error or bug, one of many that have occurred since last year’s acquisition and layoffs.

The glitch may be related to changes X made in 2016, adding "enhanced URL enrichment" to show previews for linked websites and native attachments that didn't count against X's 140-character limit. According to developer documentation, these features started appearing in December 2014.

Source

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