Twitter employee deactivates Trump’s account on last day of work

November 3, 2017 Utah Channel 3

ST. GEORGE — President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was briefly deactivated Thursday by a Twitter customer support worker who was on his or her last day on the job.

Just before 7 p.m. Thursday, the president’s personal account – @realdonaldtrump – was unavailable, showing an error message that the user “does not exist.”

In a tweeted statement, Twitter said Trump’s account was “inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee.”

The account was down for 11 minutes before being restored, the social media company reported.

Only after further review, the social media company said it had learned the deactivation “was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day” and that the company would be conducting a full internal review.

Twitter posted the following update Thursday:

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

— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017

Trump also tweeted Thursday about the deactivation of his account:

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

Although, the president did not clarify what “word” was getting out.

Email: kscott@stgnews.com

Twitter: @STGnews