Twitter Admits Trump Account Was Suspended By Departing Employee

Update: Twitter has completed its investigation...

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)
Twitter
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Update: Twitter has finally responded - blaming "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)
Twitter

* * *

Did President Donald Trump just expertly troll every member of the #resistance?

The President's twitter account disappeared shortly before 7 pm Thursday and was unavailable for just over ten minutes, providing the error message that the user "does not exist." But by 7:03 pm, it had been restored.

Trump's Twitter Account Goes Down - https://t.co/7EPwFpd6JZ pic.twitter.com/5sO8z35AEj

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911)
Twitter

It is not clear what caused the outage, the Associated Press reported, and spokespeople for the White House and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Trump hasn't tweeted since the account was restored. Of course, many of Trump's critics have complained that the president should shut down his account - and there was some speculation that he might do so after Gen. John Kelly took over as chief of staff. But the president has repeatedly said he believes retaining the ability to directly communicate with his supports is a valuable political tool.

Though it was short-lived, the outage prompted some hilarious reactions.

Those brief moments when Trump's Twitter was deleted was just like this from The Matrix Revolutions https://t.co/Rze4NPh0Z6

— ???? jacqui ???? (@heyjdey)
Twitter

That was like .003 Scaramuccis

— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps)
Twitter

Trump is gonna say his tweets were getting so many likes twitter's servers shut down so he gave jack the ok to use the most powerful servers

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein)
Twitter

Donald Trump’s Twitter account disappeared for five beautiful minutes https://t.co/RVeTZEDdzI pic.twitter.com/RG440uatiP

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton)
Twitter

Around 7 p.m. ET, Trump's Twitter handle went offline. Everyone flipped out. And then it came back. https://t.co/XNn64RTBf0 pic.twitter.com/m4M6u2JDaR

— CNN (@CNN)
Twitter