A rogue Twitter employee deactivated U.S. President Donald Trump's account on his last day with the company.
Twitter said it has "implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again." But the company declined to offer any explanation for how it would restrict access to tools that have been accessible to a range of Twitter employees. And it also won't say how many people have access to the tools necessary to deactivate an account.
The lack of protection around accounts of ordinary Twitter users as well as verified ones, was a known issue inside the company, former employees said.
The company has known about the risks of rogue employees for years. Of particular concern is that many of the customer support staff with high-level privileges are third-party contractors.
This time, Trump's account has been deactivated for 11 minutes.
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
During the brief period of downtime, shortly before 4pm Pacific time (11pm GMT), the @realDonaldTrump Twitter page would see the message "Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!"
There have been continuing calls for Twitter to suspend Trump’s account. Trump has been a passionate user of Twitter, as he posted odd syntax, publicly made threats to North Korea, hinting about changing decades of policy on nuclear weapons; praised Vladimir Putin as "very smart", even after intelligence agencies said Russia tried to influence the U.S. election; sent abusive tweets to a female journalist and made other boasts and threats.
Before Twitter’s statement, some speculated that Trump himself may have deactivated his account, or he may have been hacked. He has been criticized in the past for having poor security standards, continuing to use an old, unsecured Android device when he moved into the White House instead of using a secure, encrypted device approved by the Secret Service.
After widespread speculation about what had happened, Twitter initially said that the account had been 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," stated the company. But soon later, Twitter posted another statement:
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
— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
This isn’t the first time an employee targeted an account on their way out of the company. But in Trump's case, not everyone is his fan. Many internet users saluted the rogue employee responsible and congratulated him for his deeds.
Others claimed that they would never forget where they were the moment that Trump's Twitter account was silenced.