U.S. President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was deactivated for 11 minutes on Thursday night by an employee of the social media site on their last day of employment.
Twitter officials confirmed the news on their own Twitter page, saying they are conducting a full internal review.
Trump responded Friday morning on Twitter, saying “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 incident began around 7:00 p.m. Instead of seeing his normal Twitter feed, which is filled daily by comments from the president about North Korea, his views on the Russia meddling investigation and other policy or personal matters, there was just a blue screen.
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“Sorry, this page doesn’t exist,” it read.
Within minutes, the normal version of the page had been restored.
While some speculated that Trump had deleted his account, or that Twitter had suspended it, it turned out that it was deleted by an employee on their last day of work at Twitter.
“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.”
The apology tweet was shared by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
Some had speculated that Trump’s account was suspended because there have been vocal critics who say Trump’s comments on North Korea violate Twitter’s Terms of Service. However, a suspended account normally has a message saying “account suspended.”
Trump’s love of the social media site is well known. In an interview with Fox News in October, he credited the platform for helping him get elected.
“Tweeting is like a typewriter — when I put it out, you put it immediately on your show,” he said, according to a transcript released by the network. “I doubt I would be here if weren’t for social media, to be honest with you.”
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