It seems that X's migration from the old Twitter branding is going to take a lot more unwinding as yet.

Over the weekend, reports emerged that all images and videos attached to any tweet created before 2014 had been rendered inactive in the app, in what initially seemed to be a cost-reduction measure.
Many predicted that this was most likely the result of a decrease in storage, or altering X's network configuration, intended to decrease its load of data, which in turn would lower the cost of operations for the company. However, recent studies have been able to identify that the media elements are present, merely inaccessible within their proper location and through this, the system of X is failing to locate the source and producing posts/tweets with the media elements absent.

But it's inconsistent. Some can see images and clips in some tweets; others are just showing text-based t.co links.

Some have posited that the switch from HTTP to HTTPS circa 2014 is responsible for the shift, in effect derailing some of more recent cleaning work by the X team, while others have posited that possibly it was an intentional deactivation, and they were looking to see if users would be bothered at losing these links.

The impact would be so that none of that content could be accessed by users, which could be frustrating for the purpose of retrospective searches, and it would signify that any embedded tweets with video or images would no longer be interactive on your site, and any of your classic campaigns would effectively be deleted.

Well, not really erased as they are seemingly still somewhere on the web. But gone from view, and maybe gone forever, if this is indeed an actual test of a future direction for the app.

Another theory is this all a part of a bigger Twitter.com integration into X.com as its home domain and the X team is having issues with mass data migration. Indeed, the platform is still mainly branded as 'Twitter' and 'tweets' in all of its documentation and code, and it will face many challenges like this when transitioning.

We don't know for certain what's at play here, and we can't ask because X no longer has a press contact, but it seems to be making some sort of major change to its back-end infrastructure, which I'm tipping is related to its domain switch.

Or, as noted, it could be just a cost-cutting move, as X continues to do its work to get out of the red, amidst significantly reduced ad intake.

We will soon know the answer, as X is still refining its inner architecture.
No word on the cause, nor of the fix.