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Washington (AFP)

US President Donald Trump's well-known Twitter account briefly vanished on Thursday evening -- with the social media company blaming "human error by a Twitter employee."

Visitors to @realDonaldTrump around 7:00 pm (2300 GMT) were greeted with the message "Sorry, that page doesn't exist!"

"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," the official Twitter Government account said.

"We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again."

The outspoken US president has 41.7 million followers on his personal Twitter account, from which he blasts his most controversial and attention-grabbing comments -- often in the form of early morning "tweetstorms."

Trump's official White House account, @POTUS, which has 20.9 million followers, was apparently not affected.

Trump did not tweet about his account's vanishing act, but after it was restored made a post about his party's tax plan.

© 2017 AFP