Donald Trump’s Twitter Inadvertently Deactivated: Our Bad, Company Says

UPDATE: It didn’t take long for Twitter to figure out what happened. A customer support employee deactivated President Trump’s account on his or her last day. It’s unclear whether this was a deliberate act, though Twitter pledges to conduct “a full internal review.”

The act of sabotage briefly knocked the account offline, but Twitter quickly took responsibility for inadvertently deactivating President Donald Trump’s account, which has since been restored.

The president’s personal account, @realDonaldTrump, went dark at about 4 p.m. Thursday, displaying an error message saying the user “does not exist.” It was restored 11 minutes later.

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

Twitter initially blamed the outage on “human error,” posting a note to the social network that it was investigating to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.

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) November 3, 2017

Trump’s momentary absence from his digital soapbox of choice didn’t go unnoticed.

. @twitter HQ when @realDonaldTrump account went down. pic.twitter.com/X25lihY0VT

— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) November 3, 2017

Trump's Twitter deactivated for 11 min, and I suddenly thought I'd jumped back into the real timeline where things aren't so damned absurd.

— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) November 3, 2017