For 11 hushed minutes, the official Twitter account of President Donald Trump was silenced on Thursday, sparking both confusion and joy among stunned Twitterati.
Attempts to call up Trump’s personal page, @realDonaldTrump, turned up a message saying, “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”
Twitter intially blamed human error for the outage, but it later emerged that a rogue customer support employee - working his or her last day - deliberately took down the US leader’s personal account.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
Buzzfeed News reporter Jason Leopold joked that the anonymous saboteur should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
“Not all heroes wear capes,” tweeted MSNBC news host Joy-Ann Reid.
Another tweet said: “You say ‘human error’, I say ‘due for a promotion.’”
One wag went so far as to propose it may have been the work of a familiar foe.
A former Twitter employee told BuzzFeed that quite a few employees could suspend a user’s account, but that a far smaller number of staff - in the hundreds - could deactivate an account.
"It’s one click if you have the rights to access the tool," the source said.
Trump weighed in, of course, on the Twitter outage once his account was restored.
Within hours of his muting, the president was back on form.
He “used the platform to attack Hillary Clinton and call for a Justice Department investigation into reports the 2016 Democratic primary was rigged in her favour”, reports Politico.
