Departing Twitter employee deactivates Trump’s account

WASHINGTON – A Twitter customer support worker who was on his or her last day on the job deactivated President Donald Trump’s account for a few minutes Thursday evening, the social media company reported.

Shortly before 7 p.m. Thursday, social media reports surfaced that the president’s personal account, @RealDonaldTrump, was unavailable, providing the error message that the user “does not exist.” The account was restored by 7:03 p.m.

Twitter took responsibility for the outage. In a tweeted statement, the company said Trump’s account was “inadvertently deactivated due to human error” by one of its employees. The account was unreachable for 11 minutes.

Twitter later said the deactivation “was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day.”

“We are conducting a full internal review,” the company said.

A spokesperson for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.