For a few minutes, President Trump’s personal Twitter account appeared to be deleted Thursday afternoon – 36,300 tweets gone, replaced by Twitter’s boilerplate message “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”
It didn’t take long for “Trump’s Twitter” to start trending after it went down around 3:50 p.m. PST, but the account was restored ten minutes later.
More than two hours after the account went down, Twitter’s government and elections team blamed it on an employee, saying:
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.
But a few hours later, Twitter issued another statement — noting that it was done by an employee during his last day.
During the Trump Twitter outage, his presidential handle, @POTUS, appeared unaffected.
Trump’s last tweet before he was temporarily booted from Twitter was at 3:35 p.m., announcing his nomination of Jerome Powell as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve.
