Before there was TikTok, there was Vine, an app that played looping videos six seconds in length. It was widely popular when Twitter, now X, acquired it in 2012 for $30 million, but it was shut down a handful of years later. As the story goes, Twitter couldn’t figure out how to monetize it — and it may have been a bit ahead of its time. There was a user archive at one time, per TechCrunch, but many videos vanished — until now.
X owner Elon Musk posted on the app that this company “found the Vine video archive” and is working on restoring access.
Grok Imagine is AI Vine!
Btw, we recently found the Vine video archive (thought it had been deleted) and are working on restoring user access, so you can post them if you want.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 2, 2025
It’s unclear what’s next for Vine, but with TikTok’s future uncertain in the U.S., bringing back the short-form video app with new features could be a smart idea.
Last year, Congress passed a law requiring TikTok to separate from its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, or face a permanent ban in the U.S. After multiple extensions, the deadline is now mid-September. Some reports suggest that an entirely new version of TikTok could be built for the U.S. audience instead.
“As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement earlier this month.
Maybe Vine 2.0 will beat TikTok to the punch.
