President Trump’s infamous Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump went offline briefly on Thursday, setting forth a wave of confusion and emotions.
If Trump's Twitter is down, does this technically mean he's no longer POTUS? I mean, it's the only part of the job he pays attention to.
— John Schindler (@20committee) November 2, 2017
Some wondered if Trump had been suspended for violating Twitter’s terms of service, which many people have been calling for.
But then he was back! The outage lasted just minutes.
Here’s what Twitter said about the incident:
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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
Twitter then posted the following update.
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. We are conducting a full internal review. https://t.co/mlarOgiaRF
— Government (@Gov) November 3, 2017
Trump’s Twitter account has been under scrutiny, not only because he’s the U.S. president, but because he uses it a lot. He’s tweeted more than 36,000 times and it’s often stirred up controversy.
Some have questioned whether his threatening tweets to North Korea were at odds with Twitter’s terms and conditions.