President Donald Trump’s Twitter account briefly disappeared Thursday evening thanks to a rogue employee, but is now back up and running, according to the social messaging company.
Shortly before 7 p.m. Thursday, social media reports surfaced that the president’s personal account, @RealDonaldTrump, was unavailable, providing the error message that the user “does not exist.” The account was restored by 7:03 p.m.
Twitter took responsibility for the outage. In a tweeted statement, the company said Trump’s account was “inadvertently deactivated due to human error” by one of its employees. The account was unreachable for 11 minutes.
“We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again,” the company statement continued.
Later, the company clarified the situation.
“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,” the company tweeted.
A spokesperson for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Many users applauded the former employee.
Some users questioned the company’s hiring practices.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 02, 2017 11:21 PM.