Story highlights A park service Twitter account said previous retweets had been a mistake

Images compared crowd size of the 2009 inauguration and the one from Friday

Washington (CNN) After the National Park Service retweeted messages that negatively compared the crowd sizes at Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration to Donald Trump's inauguration Friday, representatives from the new administration asked the Interior Department's digital team to temporarily stop using Twitter -- a decision the agency now claims was out of a concern the account was hacked.

The National Park Service Twitter account retweeted this observation from New York Times reporter Binyamin Appelbaum on Friday: "Compare the crowds: 2009 inauguration at left, 2017 inauguration at right." The tweet contained images from both events showing an apparent difference in crowd size. The retweet has since been deleted.

After the retweet began to get attention, a career staffer at the Interior Department instructed employees that the "new administration has said that the department and all bureau are not supposed to tweet this weekend and wait for guidance until Monday."

The message continued, "Please make sure that any scheduled tweets are no longer scheduled," and referred all questions to another career staffer at the department.

On Saturday, the National Park Service called Friday's retweets "mistaken."

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