The United States President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was deactivated on Thursday by a Twitter employee on his last day at the company.
The President’s account disappeared for 11 minutes and users were met with: ‘Sorry, that page doesn't exist!’ message. This triggered speculation about the account being suspended.
Twitter’s Government and Elections team had first blamed it as a human error, saying that they were investigating to prevent it from happening in the future again. Later they tweeted that an employee had deactivated the account on his last day at work. “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,” the statement said.
Before Twitter’s statement, some speculated that Trump himself may have deactivated his account or he may have been hacked. For 11 minutes, President Trump had been unable to tweet and people immediately pounced on his absence. Twitteratis later called the employee a ‘hero’.
Trump usually use social networking site in a negative manner. In September, Trump had tweeted and warned leader Kim Jong-un ‘won't be around much longer’, to which North Korea had accused him of declaring war via the social media site.