News

President Trump's Twitter Account Disappears Briefly

Twitter said in a statement that an employee "inadvertently deactivated" the president's personal account.

Published Nov. 2, 2017

Updated Nov. 3, 2017
 (Casimiro PT / Shutterstock.com)
Image Via Casimiro PT / Shutterstock.com

President Donald Trump's personal Twitter account was down for 11 minutes on 2 November 2017, in what the tech company called "human error by a Twitter employee."

Just before 7 p.m. EST, a search of the president's handle, @RealDonaldTrump, produced the blue screen showing that the account "doesn't exist":

However, it was visible again within minutes. At 8:05 p.m. EST, Twitter's government and elections team said in a statement:

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.

In a second statement, Twitter said:

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.

We contacted the White House seeking comment, but have yet to hear back. The official presidential account for Trump, @POTUS, did not seem to be affected. Trump, however, continues to use his personal account.

Hours before the unexpected outage, he called for the termination of the Electronic Diversity Visa Program in response to the fatal attack carried out in New York City on 31 October 2017 by Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, who moved to the U.S. from Uzbekistan in 2010.

Eight people were killed and another 12 injured when Saipov plowed into them. On his personal account, Trump tweeted that Saipov "SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!"

Sources

Martinez, Peter. "New York Attack Suspect: Who Is Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov?" CBS News. 1 November 2017.

Updates

Update [2 November 2017]: Added statement from Twitter blaming "human error" for the president's personal account disappearing.

Update [3 November 2017]: Added follow-up statement from Twitter revealing that the employee who shut Trump's account down did so on their last day.

Arturo Garcia is a former writer for Snopes.