Twitter gets the munchies again, eats user avatars

Twitter recently changed its default user avatar--you know, the one that pops up if you haven't uploaded a picture of your own--to a cute little bird icon. Unfortunately, then the service got a little bit overzealous and started chomping up existing users' photos, replacing them with the defaults. Oops!

"Many people in my timeline suddenly have default user icons," Twitter engineer Alex Payne posted to his Twitter account on Thursday. "This is probably not intentional. I have inquired with colleagues."

By the time the end of the day rolled around on Friday, there were still plenty of missing user avatars.

"We're having an issue with disappearing user and background images," Twitter wrote on its status blog on Friday morning. "Those affected will have their custom images replaced by defaults. This is due to a caching error on our side which means that your images are not lost and have not been deleted. They are not displaying correctly and we are working to get them to load properly."

This is the second time that a disappearing-user-avatar incident has occurred on Twitter this year. Back in April, infrastructure problems resulted in many Twitter user icons temporarily disappearing--including CEO Evan Williams'. It's unclear whether the same or a similar error downed avatars this time around.

[n3td3v]

Also, you don't see anyone's avatar now unless you're logged in.

[Orion Blastar]

That reminds me, I need to change the avatar I use and try to find funny ones to use. Might as well as they tend to get deleted and replaced with the default avatar.

[ChrisLang]

Really, Twitter screws up again? First hacked, down every other day and now they just can't even write simple code?

With Gwave poised to take their silly app and make it something worthwhile it seems Twitter can find one more bullet for the gun. The one they keep shooting themselves in the foot with that is...