Departing Twitter employee 'downed' Trump account
November 3, 2017
Social media giant Twitter says an employee on his or her last day with the company is responsible for briefly deactivating US President Donald Trump's Twitter account on Thursday evening.
Those attempting to visit Trump's account @realdonaldtrump around 7:00 p.m. (2300 UTC), were greeted with an error message "Sorry, that page doesn't exist."
The account was quickly restored. Twitter said it was conducting an internal review of the incident and would work to prevent future outages:
Donald Trump has over 41 million followers on Twitter, making extensive use of the social media platform to promote his policies and attack his opponents - often in so-called "tweetstorms."
One such tirade targeted Germany and its trade surplus with the US.
A statement from Twitter said Trump's account had been down for about 11 minutes:
Trump did not tweet about his account's sudden disappearance. His first tweet after his account came back online called on US Republicans to support tax reform.
Trump's official White House account, @POTUS was not affected.
bw/gsw (AP, afp)