Twitter shut Vine down and replaced it with a stripped-back camera app on 17 January 2017, four years after the six-second video service launched. The web archive of old clips went offline the following year. Since April 2026, a free app called Divine has been restoring those videos.

Vine’s Two Shutdowns, With Dates

Vine died twice: once as a social network in January 2017, and again as an archive about a year later. Readers who remember losing their clips are usually remembering the second event.

  • June 2012: Rus Yusupov, Dom Hofmann and Colin Kroll start Vine.
  • October 2012: Twitter buys the company for a reported $30 million, before the app has launched.
  • 24 January 2013: Vine arrives on iOS, reaching Android that June and Windows Phone in November.
  • 27 October 2016: Twitter announces it will discontinue the Vine mobile app, saying viewing and downloading will continue for a while.
  • 17 January 2017: The app becomes Vine Camera, which records six-second clips but only posts them to Twitter or the camera roll. The social features are gone, and the leftover tool is retired within months.
  • 20 January 2017: A read-only web archive of old Vines opens at vine.co.
  • 2018: That archive is discontinued. Accounts of the exact month differ, with April 2018 the most commonly cited date and some sources placing the final removal in 2019.

Why Did Twitter Shut Vine Down?

Vine never made money, and by late 2016 Twitter could no longer afford to carry it. The app had no advertising product of its own at a point when Instagram and Snapchat were absorbing the same audience and paying attention to creators.

Scale was not the problem. More than 100 million people a month were using Vine by August 2014, and published counts put its active users above 200 million by December 2015.

The creator economy was the problem. In the run-up to the shutdown, a group of around 18 of Vine’s biggest stars asked the company to pay them $1.2 million each in return for a dozen videos a month plus proper monetisation tools, according to reporting by Fox Business and Billboard. Vine turned the proposal down, and most of those creators stopped posting.

Twitter’s own finances closed the question. The shutdown was announced in the same period as a cost-cutting programme that included hundreds of job losses, and video investment shifted to other properties the company had bought.

What Happened to Vine’s Replacements?

The official successor failed as well. Hofmann announced a follow-up app, Byte, on 8 November 2018 and launched it on 24 January 2020 — seven years to the day after Vine. It was sold, renamed Clash and then Huddles, and shut down on 3 May 2023.

That pattern is common for apps with devoted users and no revenue. TV Time followed the same arc, closing before its founder rebuilt it.

The format itself did not die with the app. Six-second loops became the template for TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, which now carry the audience Vine assembled.

Has Elon Musk Brought Vine Back?

No. X has promised a Vine revival three times and delivered none of them.

Musk ran a poll on 30 October 2022 asking whether Vine should return; it drew more than 4.9 million votes, 69.6 per cent in favour. He repeated the poll on 17 April 2024, with nearly 2.3 million votes and the same share supporting a comeback.

In early August 2025 he went further, saying X had found the Vine video archive, which the company had thought was deleted, and was working to restore user access. The announcement doubled as promotion for Grok Imagine, xAI’s text-to-video tool, which he described as an “AI Vine”. No date was given for the archive.

As of 10 November 2026, X has not opened that archive to the public and has announced no launch date for it. The restored videos circulating today come from somewhere else entirely.

Where Can You Watch Old Vines Now?

On Divine, a free app that rebuilt a large part of the Vine archive and opened to the public on 29 April 2026. It is not connected to X or to the original company.

Divine was built by Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee known online as Rabble, and funded by and Other Stuff, a nonprofit Jack Dorsey set up in May 2025. Dorsey, who was Twitter’s chief executive when Vine was closed, is not taking a financial return and has described the project as putting right his own decision. The app first went to waitlisted testers in November 2025 with roughly 100,000 clips.

At the public launch, reports put the restored library at about 500,000 videos from close to 100,000 original creators, rebuilt from backups made before the shutdown by the volunteer group Archive Team. Counts published since have varied, and Divine says the recovery is incomplete, so no single figure describes the archive today.

What it does differently is worth knowing before you download it:

  • Archived clips are labelled: Restored Vines carry an “archived” badge to separate them from new uploads.
  • Old accounts can be reclaimed: Original Viners verify their identity through links to their old social profiles to take back a restored account.
  • No AI video: Posts must be recorded in the app or pass provenance checks using the C2PA standard, an industry specification for tracing how a file was made.
  • Built on Nostr: The app runs on a decentralised protocol rather than a single company’s servers, with experiments in the technology behind Bluesky.

It is available at no cost on the App Store, Google Play and the Nostr app store Zapstore, with access expanding through invite codes. Compilation videos on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram remain the fallback for anything Divine has not recovered.

Questions People Still Ask About Vine

Is Vine Coming Back?

Not as Vine. X still holds the brand and has not relaunched it, while Divine, an unaffiliated app, has brought back much of the old content since April 2026.

Can You Still Find Your Own Old Vines?

Possibly. Divine restored hundreds of thousands of clips from third-party backups, but the recovery is partial, and videos that were never archived are gone.

Who Owns Vine Now?

X Corp, the company Twitter became. It bought Vine in October 2012 and has kept the brand since closing the service in 2017.

How Long Were Vine Videos?

Six seconds, looping automatically. That limit was the whole point of the format and is what Divine has copied.

Popularity was never converted into revenue. With no advertising product and no way for creators to earn, its biggest names left for platforms that paid, and Twitter cut the service during a round of cost reductions.