Rogue Twitter employee deliberately shuts Trump’s account on their last day of work
For 11 minutes, the Twitterverse somehow existed without @realDonaldTrump
A Twitter employee deliberately deactivated Donald Trump’s personal account on their last day of work, the company said on Thursday.
The move by the employee – who has not been named – meant that the president’s @realdonaldtrump account was down for 11 minutes.
During the brief period of downtime, soon before 4pm Pacific time, anyone going to the @realDonaldTrump Twitter page would see the message “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”
After widespread speculation about what had happened, Twitter initially said the account had been 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,” the company said in a statement.
But soon after the company’s @Twittergov account posted another statement revealing the outage was due to employee sabotage.