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A Twitter employee temporarily shut down the account of President Donald J. Trump on Thursday. Trump’s personal Twitter account vanished for several minutes and then reappeared. The outage lasted 11 minutes.
“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,” Twitter said in a tweet at around 7 p.m. PT this evening.
In another tweet earlier in the day, Twitter said the outage of the president’s account was the result of “human error.”
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.
— Government (@Gov) November 3, 2017
Whatever the reason for the outage, the disappearance of Trump’s critical Twitter account — for even a few brief moments — immediately set Twitter a-buzz with speculation.
POLL: Why is Trump's twitter account gone?
— Rowan (@RowanKaiser) November 2, 2017
Trump has not yet acknowledged the issue. But his Twitter account played a huge role in this campaign and continues to do so in his communication strategy as president.
Updated Nov. 2, 17:11 p.m. and 19:11 p.m. PT to include Twitter outage explanation.
