social-twitter

Wayback, twitter/x URLs

The Wayback Machine applied to twitter.com and x.com URLs, returning archived snapshots of tweets and profiles where they were crawled. You can check whether a specific tweet was captured and open the saved copy via replay links. It is among the more reliable ways to recover deleted tweets, though coverage is patchy and strongest for high-profile accounts.

Social API

Search this archive

Why it’s useful & how it works

The Wayback Machine has crawled twitter.com and x.com URLs since the platform's early days, so it is often the first place to check for a deleted tweet or a frozen copy of someone's profile page. You search by pasting the original tweet or profile URL, and the Wayback Machine shows you a calendar of available captures. Coverage is strongest for high-profile accounts that were crawled often; since X updated its crawling rules in 2023, newer captures are thinner. Echo links you to the Wayback Machine search so you can run the lookup there.

What’s inside

Coverage is uneven and capture-dependent. The Wayback Machine holds over 800 billion web pages overall, but Twitter and X content represents a small fraction, weighted toward high-traffic accounts and years before 2023.

API access

https://archive.org/wayback/available?url= ; CDX http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=&output=json

What we measured

Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.

Reachability

Direct request: Responded HTTP 200 1.4 s
Through a datacenter proxy: Responded HTTP 200 2.7 s
API, direct: Rate-limited HTTP 429 918 ms
API, through a proxy: Rate-limited HTTP 429 2.2 s

Did a real search return anything?

Returned results · 21 results for the sample query · median 11 s · stable across runs

Slow: budget for long waits, or call it asynchronously.

CDX is slow (17-25s); use the Availability API for existence checks, CDX only for full capture lists.

Benchmark coverage

Found 3 of 3 test items (100%) in the Social cluster. Median response 8.2 s.

By how well known the item is: 2/2 well-known, 1/1 mid .

Reachability measured 2026-08-22. Search checked 2026-08-22. Benchmark run 2026-08-22.