By Illustration: The Verge
If you recently clicked a link shared by The New York Times on X (formerly Twitter), you might have noticed that the page took a little longer to load than you would have expected. It wasn’t just the Times; according to an analysis by The Washington Post, links posted to X that point to the Times, Reuters, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack took about five seconds to actually load.
While I was writing this article, X seemed to fix the issue, and the sites are loading as expected from the platform. According to a post on Hacker News, the delay was put in place for The New York Times on August 4th. The user said that the delays appeared to involve Twitter’s t.co link shortener and also affected Meta’s Threads.
The list of affected…