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

Messages on iPhone (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

People found that iMessage was stripping some characters out of Twitter previews last week.
iMessage seems to have been behaving itself since Saturday.
It isn't clear what was wrong who whose problem it was to fix.

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.

Imessage Twitter Previews Broken (Image credit: Oliver Haslam / iMore)

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.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.