Twitter takes responsibility for Trump Twitter outage

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's Twitter account briefly disappeared Thursday evening, but is now back up and running, according to the social messaging company.

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.

"We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again," the company statement continued.

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

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