Musk admits X may be doomed to fail as new glitch wipes out pictures from former Twitter platform

Glitch comes after Mr Musk’s X slowed down access to the sites of rival social media platforms

Elon Musk, the owner of X – the company formerly known as Twitter – said on Saturday that the social media platform “may fail” as a new glitch wiped out most pictures tweeted before December 2014.

“The sad truth is that there are no great ‘social networks’ right now. We may fail, as so many have predicted, but we will try our best to make there be at least one,” Mr Musk posted on X.

Since his take-over of the company for $44bn, the multibillionaire has tried to shake things up, introducing radical new changes to the platform, from laying off over three-fourths of Twitter’s workforce to his latest statement that the platform’s feature to block other user profiles would be removed.

The platform, being rebranded as X, has also suffered blackouts and glitches in recent times with the latest one appearing to affect tweets with pictures and links published prior to December 2014.

X appeared to have problems displaying old posts that came with attached images or hyperlinks converted using Twitter’s built-in web link shortener.

Among the images initially lost was the famous “most retweeted” selfie from the 2014 Oscars by the event’s host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres.

This image has since been restored, but most old tweets before December 2014 have broken short links instead of the actual media or links.

“More vandalism from Elon Musk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. That’s - so far - almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service,” Brazilian YouTuber Tom Coates posted on Twitter.

The glitch comes after Mr Musk’s X intentionally slowed down access to the sites of rival social media platforms such as Threads, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as those of news organisations like New York Times last week.

X seemed to add a delay of about five seconds when people clicked on links to go elsewhere on the web.

There are speculations that the latest glitch preventing access to old images could be due to X trying to recover more server space, but this might also not be an intentional move carried out for cost-cutting purposes.

Some people also appear to be able to view their old images back again, but it remains unclear why the glitch occurred in the first place.