For the briefest of moments on Thursday night, it looked like 2017 was finally taking a positive turn. As reported by ABC News, President Donald Trump’s Twitter account disappeared for about five minutes, providing a sense of relief that I’m sure many people needed.
The president’s page vanished shortly before 7 p.m. Eastern time and less than a half hour after Trump’s last tweet, which addressed his nomination of Jerome Powell to the Federal Reserve’s chairman position. The account reappeared at approximately 7:04 with no evident changes made.
Today, it was my pleasure and great honor to announce my nomination of Jerome Powell to be the next Chairman of the @FederalReserve. pic.twitter.com/6aDuRy3zws
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 2, 2017
Despite how brief the page’s outage was, the Internet was obviously quick to celebrate its absence. You can always count on Twitter for some entertainment.
America during those six minutes of no @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/BzvmGwjkl1
— Marlow Stern (@MarlowNYC) November 2, 2017
I survived the Trump twitter outage
November 2, 2017
6:58PM to 7:04PM #neverforget
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) November 2, 2017
me hearing someone say donald trump’s twitter account is down: pic.twitter.com/kE2CjsNycD
— Monica Patel (@monicapatel917) November 2, 2017
Trump returned to tweet about an hour after the restoration, but covered the day’s tax cut rollout rather than why his account disappeared. Several Twitter users believe that the outage was a result of Robert Mueller backing up the page’s history for his Special Counsel investigation of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election.
My guess is that Robert Mueller was backing up the data as evidence of collusion or obstruction.
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) November 3, 2017
Here’s to 2017’s newest unsolved mystery.
UPDATE: Twitter has clarified that the account’s brief deactivation was due to an “employee error.” The company says that it is investigating the situation to ensure it won’t happen again.
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.
— Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) November 3, 2017
Later, the company confirmed that the employee deactivated Trump’s account on his or her last day working at Twitter.
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