TechScape: What was really behind Twitter’s mysterious disappearing images?

With Elon Musk in command, it can be hard to tell if changes at X are a mistake or a direct order from the boss. Plus, linkrot is coming for your movies and video games

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There are roughly three categories of product news about Twitter, now known as X: the real product launches, the Elon whims and the bugs. The former are the meaningful changes to the service, the things that any site might have; the middle are anything that can be done within about 24 hours of the company’s capricious owner demanding it be rolled out; and the latter are the inevitable consequences of a company doing the first two things on a skeleton staff, having laid off, fired or driven out around two-thirds of its employees in a tumultuous nine-month period.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart. Take the news that the site had removed all pictures posted before 2014. From the Verge:

X, which was formerly known as Twitter until its recent rebranding, is having a problem displaying old posts that came with images attached or any hyperlinks converted through Twitter’s built-in URL shortener. It’s unclear when the problem started, but it was highlighted on Saturday afternoon in a post by Tom Coates, and a Brazilian vtuber, @DaniloTakagi, had pointed it out a couple of days earlier.