Departing Twitter worker responsible for Trump account outage

WASHINGTON: A Twitter employee on their last day with the firm was responsible for taking down Donald Trump's account, the firm said Thursday, as the president resumed tweeting after the 11-minute outage.

Visitors to @realDonaldTrump around 7:00 pm (2300 GMT) were greeted with the message "Sorry, that page doesn't exist!"

Twitter initially said the account had been "inadvertently deactivated due to human error", but later indicated it was a prank by a departing worker.

"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," it said.

"We are conducting a full internal review," it said on the official Twitter Government account.

The outspoken president has 41.7 million followers on his personal Twitter account, which he uses to blast controversial and attention-grabbing comments -- often in the form of early morning "tweetstorms."

The outage ignited speculation over whether the account had been deliberately disabled by Twitter, but when normal service resumed the debate gave way to online mirth.

Back to the Future pic.twitter.com/bUvk7gpZFV

— ElElegante101 (@skolanach) 3 November 2017

"Trump's Twitter deactivated for 11 min, and I suddenly thought I'd jumped back into the real timeline where things aren't so damned absurd," tweeted Star Trek actor turned social media personality George Takei.

Trump's Twitter deactivated for 11 min, and I suddenly thought I'd jumped back into the real timeline where things aren't so damned absurd.

— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) 3 November 2017

Trump's official White House account, @POTUS, which has 20.9 million followers, was apparently not affected by the outage.

After the account was restored Trump did not tweet about the vanishing act, but made several posts on other topics.