President Donald Trump acknowledges the crowd during the presidential inauguration at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20. | Getty Interior Dept. ordered to close Twitter accounts after inauguration tweets

Interior Department officials have been ordered to shut down the organization's official Twitter accounts indefinitely after the National Park Service shared tweets comparing attendance at President Donald Trump's inauguration against former President Barack Obama's.

“All bureaus and the department have been directed by incoming administration to shut down Twitter platforms immediately until further notice,” said an email obtained by the Washington Post circulated to Park Service employees Friday.


Earlier Friday the verified Twitter account for the National Park Service retweeted a post from New York Times reporter Binyamin Applebaum showing side by side images of the crowds at Trump’s inauguration and at President Barack Obama’s record-setting 2009 swearing-in. Obama’s, on the left, shows a jam-packed National Mall while Trump’s, on the right, is more sparsely populated.

The photos were seen as stark evidence that Trump’s prediction of an “unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout” did not come to fruition.

The organization also retweeted another user commenting that the whitehouse.gov website had been "scrubbed clean" of pages discussing civil rights, climate change and health care.

Interior Department officials were then given an "urgent directive" to close their official accounts “until further directed." An investigation into whether the tweets were intentional, accidental or part of a hack, is underway, according to the report.

The directive encompasses the department's numerous bureaus and offices, effectively shutting down dozens of official government accounts.

The retweet was particularly jarring given that the NPS stopped providing official crowd estimates for events on the Mall, including inagurations, after a dispute over counts at the Million Man March in 1995 prompted a lawsuit threat.