Julian Assange’s Twitter account briefly vanished
The US Navy was also roped into the confusion when it inadvertently sent out a tweet with Assange’s name in quotes, which was quickly deleted
By Julie Bort
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange disappeared from Twitter for a while on Sunday.
From somewhere around 8 p.m. ET on December 24, any attempts to view his Twitter account resulted in an error message saying the page did not exist.
Assange’s brief disappearance from the social media platform attracted attention. By mid-day on December 25, his name was trending on Twitter, and his account reappeared shortly after. The account seemed to be missing its followers at first, but they re-emerged gradually as well.
It’s unclear whether the mix-up originated from Assange’s end of Twitter’s.
Twitter declined to officially comment on the matter.
In November, President Donald Trump’s account was briefly deactivated by a rogue employee on his last day of work, who later said the whole situation was a mistake. Twitter has since said it has put safeguards in place to prevent a recurrence of the same situation.