Twitter blamed “human error” for “inadvertently” deactivating President Trump’s account for a few moments Thursday, temporarily silencing perhaps the most scrutinized social media feed on earth.
“Earlier today @realdonaldtrump‘s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee. The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored. We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.”
Earlier today @realdonaldtrump’s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee. The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored. We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.
— Government (@Gov) November 3, 2017
The @realDonaldTrump account went down around 3:50 p.m. PT on Thursday afternoon, but was back up within 11 minutes.
Users attempting to view Trump’s profile were met with a “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!” message, leading some to wonder whether the account had been suspended, deleted voluntarily, or if they were experiencing some kind of technical glitch.
For those few moments, Trump’s White House aides — and all Americans — were united in not worrying about what Trump might tweet next.
“We’ll all remember where we were during the 10 minutes of peace while Donald Trump’s Twitter account was down,” wrote comedian Mike Drucker.
Trump quickly resumed tweeting, writing soon after the outage: “Great Tax Cut rollout today. The lobbyists are storming Capital [sic] Hill, but the Republicans will hold strong and do what is right for America!”