Twitter announced late Thursday that President Trump’s account had been briefly deactivated earlier in the evening not as a result of “human error,” as initially reported, but by an employee on his or her last day of 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,” the company announced in a statement. The company had initially said Trump’s account was “inadvertently deactivated.” Twitter users had both rejoiced and panicked Thursday afternoon upon visiting Trump’s page only to learn that @realDonaldTrump “doesn’t exist.” The account was down for 11 minutes before it was restored. Twitter says it plans to conduct an internal investigation following the incident.
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