US President Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account disappeared from the site for several minutes on Thursday night before returning to normal.
In a few tweets posted by its Government and Elections team, Twitter first blamed “human error,” then attributed the move to an employee who used their last day on the job to deactivate the president’s account, @realDonaldTrump.
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.
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.com/TwitterGov/sta…
The company said the account was down for 11 minutes before being restored and that a “full internal review” was under way.
During that brief time period, Twitter users -- trying to figure out what had happened to Trump’s account -- made jokes that the US president was being banned from the platform.
Both during the campaign and since he was elected to office, Trump has extensively used Twitter to communicate his thoughts, slam his opponents and even announce important policies.
Opinion polls show the vast majority of voters believe President Trump uses the social media site too much.
According to a poll from Politico and Morning Consult released in June, 69 percent of voters said Trump used Twitter too much and 59 percent of those polled said the president's use of Twitter was "a bad thing."