Donald Trump may be the world’s most powerful man but a disgruntled Twitter customer support employee on the final day at the social media giant managed to delete the ‘Twitter-happy’ US president’s account for 11 minutes.
On Thursday evening, visitors to Trump’s Twitter page for a short time could only see a message that read “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”
Trump’s account has over 41 million followers. He had joined Twitter in March 2009 and he has tweeted more than 36,000 times.
Twitter initially said the account had been “inadvertently deactivated due to human error”, but later indicated it was done intentionally by a departing worker.
“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,” it said.
Twitter did not name the staffer who deactivated Trump’s account, but it did describe the person as a “customer support employee.”
“We are conducting a full internal review,” it said on the official Twitter government account.
Trump brushed off the outage in a new tweet on Friday, suggesting it showed the “impact” he was having.
“My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee,” Trump wrote. “I guess the word must finally be getting out-and having an impact.”
After his account was restored, Trump’s first tweet was about the Republican Party’s tax cuts plan.
Trump has been actively using the social media platform to promote his policies and also attack his political opponents both during the presidential campaign in 2016 and since assuming office in January.
In one interview he said that when someone said something about him, he was able to go “bing, bing, bing on Twitter” - and take care of it.
Trump has even used Twitter to announce major policy changes, and even surprised Pentagon officials in July by tweeting that transgender people would be barred from serving in any capacity in the US military.
In one of his other most controversial tweets, Trump had taunted Federal Bureau of Investigation chief James Comey days before sacking him in May.
Meanwhile, the fact that one worker was able to take down the president’s account left people asking whether Twitter has appropriate internal controls.
“This is a case of human negligence and lack of process in place,” Subramanian Udaiyappan, a Bangalore-based cybersecurity specialist at Cisco told CNN.
“Twitter needs to ensure that only the right people have access to such actions and these have to go through process permissions, approvals and logging before any action is taken by an employee,” Udaiyappan said.
Meanwhile, Twitter was also flooded with people wanting to congratulate the employee responsible.
“Kudos to the @twitter customer support employee who deactivated Trump’s twitter account on his last work day. You sir are my hero,” one person tweeted.
“Whoever disabled Donald Trump’s Twitter account shouldn’t be sacked. They should be promoted,” another one tweeted.
Image: US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive to board Air Force One for travel to Hawaii, on his way to an extended trip to five countries in Asia, from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
