X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014::Ellen’s famous ‘most retweeted’ selfie from the 2014 Oscars has had its image restored, but most old tweets have broken short links instead of the media or links that should be there.
Exactly. It’s always been likely to be broken by someone at some point. Url shorteners are a thing mostly because of twitters original character limit. Or at least that’s when they gained popularity.