Patrick Mcmahon
For about 10 minutes, the Twitter account associated with President Donald Trump disappeared — prompting celebration and speculation, primarily among Twitter-obsessed journalists who would notice something as small as an 11-minute Twitter outage.
Videos by Rare
RELATED: The #AskTrump Twitter Q&A went about as well as you could have imagined
When one of Trump’s 41 million Twitter followers (or anyone else) went to his account, they just saw a message that said “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”
Wait, Trump's twitter account has disappeared. Is this how we do coups now? https://t.co/4rL1zGXicV
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 2, 2017
Trump's Twitter account has vanished pic.twitter.com/B0hQpBO9OW
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) November 2, 2017
Did someone end TRUMP on TWITTER? pic.twitter.com/mUMweetSA9
— Mr. Newberger (@jeremynewberger) November 2, 2017
https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/926224716309975040
According to screenshots, it was gone, like it never existed. Then, as quietly as it went out, it came back.
But wait! After fielding questions about the outage, there’s an explanation — and it seems that someone at Twitter actually pulled the plug on the President’s Twitter account. In a statement, Twitter wrote:
“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.”
Some speculated that Trump’s Twitter had finally been taken down after numerous tweets that would seem to contradict Twitter’s terms of service, including some of his tweets about nuclear war with North Korea.
https://twitter.com/markchildress/status/926242373478375426
They later updated that statement to include some very juicy context: It wasn’t “inadvertent” at all.
No, it was an employee on their way out of the company, taking a few minutes to delete the President of the United States’ Twitter account.
“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.”
A reporter for The Verge, citing his own contacts, says a professional group of former Twitter employees are “now referring to this individual as ‘the legend.'”
[anvplayer video=”4006463″]
