Twitter employee ‘inadvertently’ deactivates Trump’s account on last day

MANILA, Philippines (UPDATED) – “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!” 

For a brief 11 minutes, @realDonaldTrump’s Twitter account displayed that message after a Twitter customer support employee deactivated the account on his last day, according to a statement by Twitter.

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 released a statement saying the account was “inadvertently deactivated due to human error”.

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

Later, Twitter said, it was a prank by a departing employee. 

The account was restored and the President was able to send out his tweet regarding his tax-reform plan.

Great Tax Cut rollout today. The lobbyists are storming Capital Hill, but the Republicans will hold strong and do what is right for America!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017

Trump is known for his controversial no-holds-barred approach to the platform. There have been previous calls for Twitter to ban Donald Trump’s account after several users expressed concerns regarding his tweets about North Korea.

Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2017

Twitter has stood their ground and explained that despite what some users might see as clear violations of Twitter’s terms of use, they also take into consideration ‘”newsworthiness” and whether a Tweet is of public interest’.

THREAD: Some of you have been asking why we haven’t taken down the Tweet mentioned here: https://t.co/CecwG0qHmq 1/6

— Twitter PublicPolicy (@Policy) September 25, 2017

We hold all accounts to the same Rules, and consider a number of factors when assessing whether Tweets violate our Rules 2/6

— Twitter PublicPolicy (@Policy) September 25, 2017

Among the considerations is “newsworthiness” and whether a Tweet is of public interest 3/6

— Twitter PublicPolicy (@Policy) September 25, 2017

This has long been internal policy and we’ll soon update our public-facing rules to reflect it. We need to do better on this, and will 4/6

— Twitter PublicPolicy (@Policy) September 25, 2017

Twitter is committed to transparency and keeping people informed about what’s happening in the world 5/6

— Twitter PublicPolicy (@Policy) September 25, 2017

We’ll continue to be guided by these fundamental principles 6/6

— Twitter PublicPolicy (@Policy) September 25, 2017

The outspoken US president has 41.7 million followers on his personal Twitter account, from which he blasts his most controversial and attention-grabbing comments – often in the form of early morning “tweetstorms.”

The outage ignited speculation over whether the account had been deliberately disabled by Twitter, but when normal service resumed the debate gave way to online mirth.

“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,” tweeted Star Trek actor turned social media personality George Takei.

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

After the account was restored Trump did not tweet about the vanishing act, but made several posts on other topics. – with reports from Agence France-Presse/Rappler.com