Trump Twitter account restored after brief interruption
President Donald Trump’s Twitter account briefly disappeared Thursday evening thanks to a rogue employee, but is now back up and running, according to the social messaging company.
Shortly before 7 p.m. Thursday, social media reports surfaced that the president’s personal account, @RealDonaldTrump, was unavailable, providing the error message that the user “does not exist.” The account was restored by 7:03 p.m.
Twitter took responsibility for the outage. In a tweeted statement, the company said Trump’s account was “inadvertently deactivated due to human error” by one of its employees. The account was unreachable for 11 minutes.
“We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again,” the company statement continued.
Later, the company clarified the situation.
“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,” the company tweeted.
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) November 3, 2017
A spokesperson for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Many users applauded the former employee.
Can we celibate him or her as a international hero? Maybe a statue in the U.N.?
— Johan Melander (@thea3u) November 3, 2017
Now that's what I call customer support. Well done, departed employee; please accept this toast and the thanks of a grateful nation.
— Felina (@FelinaBlanc) November 3, 2017
Some of us didn’t witness this. Kindly delete it again so we can all enjoy.
— Norm Kelly (@norm) November 3, 2017
Some users questioned the company’s hiring practices.
This doesn't say much for the quality of the people you hire.
— Tess (@hyacinth0329) November 3, 2017
Um deleting the president of the United States twitter should be grounds for firing and also this is corruption.
— Bonnie (@BonBee81) November 3, 2017
Because they're a publicly traded company that look like idiots if a customer support guy can shut off President of the United States acct
— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) November 3, 2017
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 2, 2017 at 11:21 PM with the headline "Trump Twitter account restored after brief interruption."