Recently, a mysterious bug on Twitter has been causing issues with links and images in old posts. This bug not only affects URLs leading to external websites but also breaks the previews and replaces original URLs with short t.co links. For example, journalist Matt Novak had a tweet with a URL leading to a Gizmodo article, but now the preview is gone and the original URL has been replaced by two short t.co links. However, an archived version of the same tweet still shows the article preview and an active clickable link as mentioned by Novak.

Wayback Machine

This is not the first time Twitter has experienced such a bug. In the first week of March 2023, there was a similar issue where links embedded within tweets were broken. However, Twitter quickly resolved that issue. The Twitter Support account explained at the time that it was the result of an internal change with unintended consequences. There was also a similar problem in 2016 when some Mac users reported that shortened “t.co” URLs were not opening properly in Apple’s Safari browser.