Trump’s Twitter goes down briefly, company blames employee

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s Twitter account briefly disappeared Thursday evening, but is now back up and running, according to the social messaging company.

About 3:50 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 4:03 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.

Later, the company said the employee deactivated the account “on the employee’s last day.”

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) November 3, 2017

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) November 3, 2017

A spokesperson for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The account boasts 41 million followers. The outage ignited a social media storm.

Trump had tweeted as recently as 3:35 p.m., sharing a video of him formally nominating Jerome Powell as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Today, it was my pleasure and great honor to announce my nomination of Jerome Powell to be the next Chairman of the @FederalReserve. pic.twitter.com/6aDuRy3zws

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 2, 2017

The President had recently drawn ire for his tweets about the Manhattan terror attack. He tweeted on Wednesday that Sayfullo Saipov, the man identified as the shooter, “should get the death penalty.” Experts told NBC News that his tweets could make it harder for prosecutors in the case against Saipov.

...There is also something appropriate about keeping him in the home of the horrible crime he committed. Should move fast. DEATH PENALTY!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 2, 2017

In the past, campaigns have been launched for Twitter to take action against Trump’s account for apparently violating its rules.

Twitter was forced to comment on the backlash in September, after Trump tweeted, “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!”

“Among the considerations is ‘newsworthiness’ and whether a tweet is of public interest,” the policy team wrote in a statement at the time. “This has long been internal policy and we’ll soon update our public-facing rules to reflect this.”

The official @POTUS account, which mostly consists of retweets from @realDonaldTrump, was unaffected.