Trump's Twitter account briefly vanished Thursday evening


For a few moments on Thursday evening, President Trump's Twitter account – his sanctuary, safe space, and lifeline to the outside world — did not exist.
Visitors to his page were greeted not with his Thursday morning call for the death penalty, but rather the message, "Sorry, that page doesn't exist!" It wasn't the same page that appears when a Twitter user violates the terms of service and is suspended, causing the curious to wonder what was going on — was he hacked? Did he finally take Hillary Clinton's advice and delete his account? Maybe he revealed what "covfefe" means and it caused Twitter's servers to melt down?
The disappearance was fleeting — within 11 minutes of the account vanishing, it was back up. Twitter Government later announced that the account was "inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee," and an investigation is underway and steps are being taken to "prevent this from happening again."
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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