Several URL shorteners have shut down and taken every link with them. In our data, tr.im, x.co (GoDaddy), su.pr (StumbleUpon), tcrn.ch (TechCrunch, domain gone), huff.to (HuffPost) and snipurl.com all failed for effectively 100% of the links we tested; goo.gl is degrading but still resolves about 85%. The scariest ones, though, are the dead links that still return a healthy 200.
A URL shortener is a promise: "click this tiny link and I'll send you to the real one." When the shortener dies, it breaks that promise for every link it ever made — all at once, retroactively, forever. We followed thousands of archived links through the dead and dying to see which shorteners kept their promise and which took the whole address book down with them.
The dead: shorteners that took every link with them
These returned a failure for effectively 100% of the archived links we tested. Every short code anyone ever made on them is gone — not the destination, the shortener:
| Domain | Operator | What happened | Died | Tested |
|---|---|---|---|---|
tr.im | tr.im | Service folded; no code resolves | 2009 | 124 |
su.pr | StumbleUpon | Shut with StumbleUpon; codes 301 to a homepage | 2018 | 46 |
x.co | GoDaddy | Discontinued; all codes dead | 2019 | 88 |
tcrn.ch | TechCrunch | Domain gone entirely — no DNS | — | 37 |
huff.to | HuffPost | Service dead; every code fails | — | 42 |
snipurl.com | SnipURL | Service dead; every code fails | — | 39 |
Two of these deserve a moment. tcrn.ch — TechCrunch's own branded shortener — no longer resolves at DNS at all, so not even a redirect is possible: the domain simply isn't there anymore. And tr.im has been dead since 2009, one of the very first shortener casualties and a warning the whole industry mostly shrugged off.
The dying: shorteners quietly bleeding links
Death isn't binary. Several shorteners still run but are losing codes steadily — which is arguably worse, because they look fine right up until the one link you needed is the one that's gone:
| Domain | Operator | Dead | Tested |
|---|---|---|---|
tiny.cc | tiny.cc | 34.7% | 144 |
git.io | GitHub (retired 2022) | 34.4% | 32 |
lnkd.in | 26.7% | 15 | |
reut.rs | Reuters | 20.0% | 5 |
goo.gl | Google (shut down 2025) | 15.0% | 4,291 |
git.io is the cautionary tale: GitHub retired it in 2022, and a third of its links are already gone even though the domain still answers. A shortener run by one of the largest companies on earth is only as permanent as that company's enthusiasm for keeping it alive.
The zombies: dead links that fake being alive
Here's the genuinely unsettling part. The worst outcome isn't a clean 404 — it's a shortener that looks perfectly healthy while serving nothing anyone actually linked to.
su.pr now 301-redirects every dead code to stumbleupon.com. A clean, 200-OK redirect — to a page that has nothing to do with what was linked.
Rebrandly does its own version, sending broken codes to app.rebrandly.com/broken-links. Both return a healthy 200, so no uptime monitor will ever alert you — the link is dead, but every dashboard says it's up. A hard 404 is honest by comparison. (Our link checker follows the whole chain, so you can see where one of these zombies actually dumps you.)
The one we were wrong about (and admitted it)
Confession: we flagged goo.gl as dead before running the numbers — Google announced its shutdown, so, obviously, right? The data laughed at us. 85% of goo.gl links still resolve, largely the goo.gl/maps ones Google kept alive. We checked instead of assuming, got it wrong, and are reporting it anyway — because that's the only way the rest of the numbers are worth anything.
The survivors — and what they have in common
The good news: most big shorteners are holding up fine. bit.ly (5.0% dead), t.co (Twitter/X, 5.3%), tinyurl.com (1.3%), ow.ly (Hootsuite, 1.2%), and the platform-owned ones like youtu.be and amzn.to (both under 0.2%) are all healthy. The pattern in who lives and who dies is boringly consistent: the survivors are backed by a company for whom the shortener still matters. The casualties were side projects, acquisitions left to rot, or one-person hobbies. And you can't tell which is which from the outside — a link on a healthy-looking shortener and a link on a doomed one look identical the day you make them.
Worse, even a "surviving" link isn't guaranteed to still go where you meant — 8.6% of still-working short codes now point somewhere different than they originally did. Survival and correctness are two separate problems.
The lesson: don't rent your links from a company that can vanish
Every domain in that graveyard was, once, a totally reasonable place to put a link. The people who used them weren't careless — the services just didn't outlive the links. The only shortener guaranteed to be around as long as your links is one running on a domain you own, that can't be discontinued, acquired, or sunset by someone whose priorities changed.
Want links that never join this graveyard? Create them on in.bio — our links never expire. Every short link stays live for good, and with a free account it lives on a domain you control (not one a company can shut down), you can re-point it any time, and you get real, bot-filtered click analytics on every one. That's the entire reason to use a link that can't be switched off by someone else. If you're picking a tool, we compared the field in the best URL shorteners.
Numbers from our study of 134,515 archived short links — full method and the downloadable dataset are there.