THE SELFIE THAT broke Twitter records and spawned a thousand copycat snaps mysteriously disappeared from the internet last night.

That’s right: Ellen’s Oscar selfie actually disappeared from Twitter.

There was uproar in the Twitterverse when fans clicked the link to the record-breaking tweet expecting to see all those smiling celebrity faces and were met with an error message instead.

Screengrab Screengrab

Chaos ensued.

Whoops!

We couldn't find this Tweet

Whoops!

We couldn't find this Tweet

It wasn’t long before Twitter took to its official status blog to confirm that it was aware of the situation and believed a bug was preventing a number tweets from appearing.

Twitter Twitter

Some had other ideas.

The news spread like wildfire with the LA Times even getting on the case, but by the early hours of this morning all seemed to be well with the world.

A quick click on the link in question revealed that the picture had been restored.

Did a bug REALLY take it offline temporarily?

Or was someone trying to cut the ensuing selfie tsunami off at the source?

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We’ll leave it to you to decide for yourselves.

Read: Obama says Ellen’s Oscar selfie was a ‘cheap stunt’>

More: Colin Powell thinks his 60-year-old selfie is better than Ellen’s>