US President Donald Trump’s @realdonaldtrump Twitter account was deactivated by a Twitter employee who was leaving the company on Thursday and was down for 11 minutes before it was restored, the social media company said.
Anyone who went to his page was given the generic blue landing page that read, “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”
It was later learned that it wasn’t a glitch but the work of a Twitter employee on his or her last day at work. Initially, one of the social media site’s verified accounts said Trump’s feed was “inadvertently deactivated due to a human error.”
But a couple of hours later, Twitter announced further investigation revealed “a Twitter customer support employee did this on the employee’s last day.” The company said it’s conducting “a full internal review” of the incident.
Earlier today @realdonaldtrump’s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee. The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored. We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.
— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) 3 November 2017
Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day. We are conducting a full internal review. https://t.co/mlarOgiaRF
— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) 3 November 2017
Trump has made extensive use of messages on Twitter to attack his opponents and promote his policies both during the 2016 presidential campaign and since taking office in January. He has 41.7 million followers on Twitter.
The president wrote in a tweet: ‘My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee. I guess the word must finally be getting out-and having an impact.’
The account was restored by 7.03 pm and Twitter took responsibility for the outage.
