For his part, President Donald Trump seemed unruffled by the Twitter outage. | J. David Ake/AP Twitter employee briefly takes down Trump’s account

A Twitter employee appears to have succeeded, briefly, at something the White House staff has almost certainly hoped for at times.

A customer support employee working his or her last day at the company deliberately took down President Donald Trump’s Twitter account on Thursday, according to the company. For about 11 minutes, the president’s main platform for online commentary and communication went dark.


Twitter users noticed Trump’s account appeared suspended or deleted around 5:50 p.m. In the ensuing 11 minutes, online conspiracy theories, jokes and memes raged. Then Twitter announced that the account was back — apparently after an inadvertent human error.

“Earlier today @realdonaldtrump ’s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee,” the company Tweeted. The company promised to investigate.

But a few hours later, the company tweeted again — this time saying an early review pointed to a deliberate act of online sabotage.

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“Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day,” the company tweeted. “We are conducting a full internal review.”

For his part, Trump seemed unruffled by the Twitter outage.

Within hours of his brief muting, the president used the platform to attack Hillary Clinton and call for a Justice Department investigation into reports that the 2016 Democratic primary was rigged in her favor.

