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is it a glitch or is it to save on storage costs?

Two things about storage:

Basic block storage - high capacity spinning rust - is very cost effective and 'cheap', even when used in a high-availability / redundant configuration.

Said, similar storage, supplied by a Cloud provider, is stupidly expensive in relative terms. Albeit, 'cold' versions can be reasonable value if you don't want realtime access to your data, and you can work your way through the maze of egress price charging points.

You forgot about bandwidth costs. The entire benefit of a CDN is moving data closer to the user to not only speed up access time, but cut down on data transfer fees. So you can either replicate your entire database across all CDN nodes (and pay more for duplicated storage), or you can have cold storage in one location (and pay more for transferring the data).

The thesis of deliberately deleting all these images would be premised on the idea that no one was accessing them anyways, hence they're useless. That merely storing (but seldom accessing) them is very cheap is a sufficient rejoinder to that thesis.

> The thesis of deliberately deleting all these images would be premised on the idea that no one was accessing them anyways

That doesn't make sense. The OP seems to be implying the exact opposite in fact.

Scream test

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