WASHINGTON (AP) — A Twitter customer support worker who was on his or her last day on the job deactivated President Donald Trump’s account for a few minutes Thursday evening, the social media company reported.
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.
Twitter later said the deactivation “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 said.
Trump made light of his account going dark.
Early Friday, Trump tweeted: “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.”
Trump uses his account — which has more than 41 million followers — as a mouthpiece for the U.S. presidency. He posted a series of tweets Friday morning before taking off for a trip to Asia.
