 account was down for a total of 11 minutes after a Twitter employee decided to deactivate the account on their last day.){kind=link}
Donald Trump’s Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) account was down for a total of 11 minutes after a Twitter employee decided to deactivate the account on their last day.
The employee, who has not been named, took the account offline shortly before 4 pm Pacific time (11 pm GMT). Shortly after, Twitter said the account had been deactivated “due to human error by a Twitter employee”.
There have been many calls for Twitter to delete the US President’s account due to the many controversial tweets. This was particularly called for following Trump’s threats to North Korea.
In a statement, the tech giant said: “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,”
Rumours following the deactivation were that Trump was hacked. Trump has been called out for his poor security standards. The President still uses his unsecured Android phone rather than trading it for an encrypted device approved by the Secret Service when moving into The White House.
This was soon followed by a tweet from the @Twittergov account, blaming an employee who was on their last day of the job in the Twitter office.
“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,”
Trump is famous for his love of the social media forum. “It’s like owning your own newspaper – without the losses,” he said in 2012.
The US President has since tweeted a response to the deactivation.
“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,” the tweet read.
Since the stunt, users have taken to Twitter to congratulate the person responsible.