Why did my Twitter bookmarks disappear?

Open x.com/i/bookmarks in a desktop browser, signed in to the account that made the bookmarks, and scroll.

• A row is there but the post is blank or says it's unavailable. The post was deleted, the account was suspended, deactivated or made protected, or the account has blocked you. See "The post is gone" below.
• Older bookmarks are missing entirely, or the list stops loading. The posts may still exist. See "The list stopped showing them" below.
• The whole list is empty. Check that you're in the right account first. Each X account has its own separate bookmark list.

A bookmark on X is a pointer to a live post. It doesn't store a copy. When the post is deleted, or its account is suspended, deactivated or protected, or the account has blocked you, X has nothing left to show you, and it won't hand you the text.

There's no setting or support request that brings a deleted post back into your bookmarks. Upgrading to a paid X plan doesn't change this either. Your options for seeing what the post said are outside X: an archived copy on the Wayback Machine, a quote post that reproduced it, or a screenshot you or someone else took. How to see deleted tweets walks through each one and is honest about how often they fail.

If the account was protected rather than deleted, the posts still exist. You'd see them again only if the owner makes the account public or approves you as a follower.

This one looks the same but isn't data loss. Common causes and fixes:

An app or sync glitch

Sign out of X and sign back in. Update the app, or force-quit and reopen it. Then check the list on the web as well as in the app, because the two sometimes disagree. Bookmarks that come back after this were never deleted.

A long list that stops loading

On long bookmark lists, older posts sometimes stop appearing as you scroll. X doesn't publish a bookmark limit, so there's no documented number to blame and no setting to show the rest. Scrolling in a desktop browser, slowly, works better than the app for some people. More on this in is there a Twitter bookmark limit?.

You removed it by accident

Tapping the bookmark icon on a post you've already bookmarked removes it. If one specific post is missing, find it again and re-bookmark it.

Signed in to a different account

If you switch between accounts, each one has its own list. The bookmarks are in the account you were using when you saved them.

Don't delete newer bookmarks to "make room". X doesn't describe bookmarks as having a quota you can free up, and if the older ones were removed, deleting more just loses more. Don't install tools that promise to "recover deleted bookmarks". A post that's been deleted from X isn't available to any third-party app either.

The fix is to keep a copy of the posts that matter, while they still exist. A screenshot or a PDF works for a handful. For anything more, WHT.day's X bookmark sync connects to your X account with read-only access, imports your recent bookmarks, and checks for new ones three times a day. Each post is saved with its text, author and media, so it's still in your archive after the original is deleted. You can also save a single post with the browser extension. WHT.day is $8 a month or $68 a year.

WHT.day can only copy posts that still exist when they're imported. It can't recover posts that were deleted before you connected.