The incident impacted years-old social media archives belonging to major brands like McDonald’s and Burger King, as well as posts published by Donald Trump between 2009 and 2013. In the Trump archive alone, 56 of 97 examined short links were found to have been created after the original publication dates. Although company documentation explicitly prohibits reusing link endings, third parties managed to claim previously assigned URLs. In response, the platform acted to disable the compromised links and post account suspension warnings.
Key points
The redirections stemmed from platform-side re-registrations rather than compromises of i…: The redirections stemmed from platform-side re-registrations rather than compromises of individual social media accounts.
Third parties directed traffic from historic corporate and public posts toward cryptocurr…: Third parties directed traffic from historic corporate and public posts toward cryptocurrency-themed domains, YouTube videos, and Wikipedia articles.
The re-registrations directly contradicted company documentation stating that URL endings…: The re-registrations directly contradicted company documentation stating that URL endings cannot be reused even after account deletion.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
Update, 15 November, 19:30 UTC: The Burger King and McDonald’s links no longer redirect. Both were still working at 15:05 UTC and returned Bitly’s “Link Deactivated” page by 19:22 UTC. The same has happened to the two extra Trump links we verified and to six of the seven links in our sample that pointed somewhere new. The seventh now shows a Bitly warning that the account that created it has been suspended. The 49 re-created links that look like the originals still work.
Burger King’s X account was not hacked. A Bitly short link in a tweet the chain posted on 24 July 2011 was registered again by someone else on 15 November 2026 and pointed at Wikipedia’s list of Nazi concentration camps. The tweet was advertising a restaurant locator. A post quoting it passed 2 million views within hours, and Burger King’s original has since become unavailable.
It was not the only one. Eighteen minutes earlier a Bitly link in a McDonald’s tweet from 7 June 2011 was registered the same way and pointed at Wikipedia’s article on the…
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