This is not a drill. Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, appears to have been momentarily deleted or suspended. The account was offline for a few minutes this afternoon before reappearing, during which time visitors to his account were greeted with an error that states, “That page doesn’t exist.”
It’s not clear whether the president’s account was suspended, if he deleted it himself, or if it was simply some kind of error. Activists have been lobbying Twitter for months to suspend the account, arguing that his tweets violate Twitter’s terms of service.
But we all saw it with our own eyes. Sad!
We’ve reached out to Twitter for clarification on just what happened to make Trump’s account inaccessible.
Did Twitter do it pic.twitter.com/HXRHbbmMPi
— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) November 2, 2017
Update 8:00 p.m.: Twitter says that Trump’s Twitter account was “inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee” and that the company is taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
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
Update 10:10 p.m.: Twitter announced that Trump’s account was deactivated by a (legendary) customer support employee on their last day of work at the company. It’s not clear why a single support employee would have the power to deactivate the the president’s account, but Twitter says it is conducting a full review.
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. https://t.co/mlarOgiaRF
— Government (@Gov) November 3, 2017
Update 11/3, 2:00 p.m.: Twitter has now introduced new procedures to prevent rogue employees from taking down Trump’s twitter account in the future. The company noted that it won’t share details about its internal investigation or what procedures it put in place to prevent this from happening again.
Update: We have implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again. We won’t be able to share all details about our internal investigation or updates to our security measures, but we take this seriously and our teams are on it. https://t.co/8EfEzHvB7p
— Government (@Gov) November 3, 2017
If you work at Twitter and have any information about this situation, we’d love to hear from you.
