Trump takes to Twitter to respond to deactivation of account by ‘rogue employee’
The day after his Twitter account was deactivated, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to seemingly make light of the incident.
For about 11 minutes Thursday around 3:50 p.m. PT, Trump’s social media forum was shut down. During that time, anyone who searched for Trump’s account instead saw, “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”
On Thursday, Twitter initially said, “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.”
However, hours later, the company clarified a customer support employee had intentionally deleted Trump’s account on the person’s last day at Twitter.
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
— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
Early Friday, at around 4 a.m., Trump tweeted his response to the incident, pinning it on “a rogue employee”:
My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee. I guess the word must finally be getting out-and having an impact.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017
Trump has more than 41 million followers on his Twitter account, The Associated Press reports, and often uses it as a platform, including for many presidential matters.
Here are more responses to the deactivation of Trump’s Twitter page:
This story was originally published November 3, 2017 at 7:48 AM with the headline "Trump takes to Twitter to respond to deactivation of account by ‘rogue employee’."