Rogue Twitter employee deactivated President Trump’s personal account on last day on the job, company says

President Donald Trump boasted Nov 3 of his social media influence after his personal Twitter account was briefly deactivated by a departing company employee, raising serious questions about the security of tweets the president wields to set major policy agendas, connect with his voter base and lash out at his adversaries. The deactivation Nov 2 sparked deep and troubling questions about who has access to the president's personal account, @realDonaldTrump, and the power that access holds. The deactivation also came at a time when the social network is under scrutiny for the role it played in spreading Russian propaganda during the 2016 presidential election.

President Trump's account disappeared at around 6:45 p.m. ET Nov 2, when visitors to the page were met with the message, “Sorry, that page doesn't exist!” By 7 p.m., it was back, and the Twittersphere began joking about the short-lived window of history without @realDonaldTrump. Then, at 8:05 p.m., at the same time Trump was tweeting about tax revisions, the company posted a statement saying the president'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,” the statement read. “We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.” But two hours later, the company admitted that the deactivation wasn't an accident at all: A preliminary investigation revealed that the account was taken offline “by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee's last day.” Twitter said it was conducting a full internal review.