President Trump's Twitter account disappeared from the massive Thaonline sharing forum Thursday night at approximately 7 p.m. ET. When users attempted to search for the popular account they were presented with an unexpected "Sorry, that page doesn't exist!"
Speculation roared about what could have happened in the short time that the president of the United States' Twitter-verified user account had vanished.
What. Donald Trump's Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, has gone. pic.twitter.com/EUNHvfXHhn
— Jamie Ross (@JamieRoss7) November 2, 2017
President Trump has long been a fan of the social sharing site, with it's capacity for him to communicate with his more-than 41 million followers instantly with his thoughts and feelings on current events. He has typed over 36,000 tweets since March 2009 when he first created an account on the open news network.
At first, the social media site announced that the account had been "inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee," and that "We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again."
However, it now appears that the disappearance wasn't an accident at all.
As it turns out, the real reason for the deactivation was not a mere glitch or accident on the part of the website. Later in the evening Twitter revealed that the hotly debated account was deleted by the direct action of a disgruntled employee.
"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," a Twitter verified account posts. "We are conducting a full internal review."
The Commander-In-Chief tweeted out a bizarre response this morning once he had regained access to his social media handle.
My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee. I guess the word must finally be getting out-and having an impact.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017
There were some issues restoring the account, with not all of the followers being added back at once, appearing as though the president only had a few fans.