The bug that caused iMessage to lose some Twitter link characters is fixed

If you noticed that some characters were missing from Twitter previews in iMessage on Friday, good news — it’s fixed.

I first began noticing that iMessage was missing the first and last character of Twitter previews on Friday when my wife pointed it out. Since then it seems more and more people noticed the same problem.

Whenever iMessage sends or received a URL it tries to build a preview of what the destination web page looks like. In the case of Twitter, we get a look at the content of the tweet as well as any images that are attached to it. Except on Friday, when always the first and often last characters were missing.

The issue affected iMessage on all platforms including iPhone, iPad, and in the screenshot above, Mac. Those running all the latest versions of iOS 15 and macOS Monterey were impacted and the issue appeared to be server-side, meaning no software update would be required to fix it.

That seems to have been the case, with tweets sent since Saturday morning being sent, received, and previewed as normal — all characters intact. Thankfully, our global nightmare is over.

It still isn’t clear what was going on or whose problem it was to fix, but whoever it was, they fixed it. Good news all around, thankfully.