Twitter Employee Blamed For Deleting President's Account

Updated at 2:25 p.m. ET

With the push of a button, an employee at Twitter accomplished for a brief few minutes on Thursday what President Trump's closest advisers have reportedly been trying unsuccessfully to do for months: shut down the seemingly never-ending tweet stream at @realDonaldTrump.

Perhaps it was an act of civil disobedience, or maybe just a "take this job and shove it" moment, but shortly before 7 p.m. ET, the president's personal account kicked back the error message "does not exist." By 7:03 p.m., it was up and running again and within about a half-hour, new presidential tweets were forthcoming.

The folks at Twitter leapt into action to find out what had happened. At first, they attributed the problem to "human error." But later, with no references to error or accident, the company said that an employee deactivated the account on his or her last day on the job.

The company later said, "We have implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again."

Not surprisingly, the brief outage has spawned an amusing array of reactions.

And the president himself chimed in:

As for formal reactions, a spokesperson for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to The Associated Press.