Twitter Employee Intentionally ‘Deactivated’ Trump Account On Last Day Of Work

@realDonaldTrump feed temporarily taken down – internal review begins.

US President Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account briefly vanished without warning on Thursday, leading some to celebrate, and others wondering what was going on. The vanishing feed was only temporary however, and has since been restored.

It now seems that Trump hasn’t deleted his Twitter account as many had initially hoped but the work of an employee on their last day who was responsible. The president resumed tweeting after a brief 11-minute outage.

Prolific

Mr Trump joined Twitter in March 2009 and he has tweeted more than 36,000 times.

His use of Twitter has been prolific since he joined the platform in 2009, and in recent times has used it to promote his policies and also attack his political opponents both during the presidential campaign in 2016 and since taking office in January.

During the brief period of downtime, anyone going to the @realDonaldTrump Twitter page would see the message “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”

Story changed

Twitter initially would only say that Trump’s account had been “inadvertently deactivated due to human error”, but later admitted it had been done intentionally by a departing worker. 

“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,” the company said. “We are conducting a full internal review,” it said on the official Twitter Government account.

There have been continuing calls for Twitter to suspend Trump’s account in recent times, particularly when he made threats to North Korea, and because he has consistently tweeted factually incorrect statements.  

Trump’s official White House account, @POTUS, which has 20.9 million followers, was apparently not affected by the outage.