Attempts to call up Trump’s personal page, @realDonaldTrump, turned up a message saying, “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”, prompting many Twitter users to send out screenshots. Within minutes, the account was once again available. The official feed for the US president, @POTUS, wasn’t affected.
“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,” the company tweeted, after citing inadvertent “human error” in an earlier post.
Twitter has mistakenly frozen accounts in the past. In 2016, Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey was locked out of his own for a few minutes. Dorsey said in a tweet that the suspension was “an internal mistake.” Users can also deactivate their own accounts. Once someone chooses to do so, Twitter retains that data for 30 days, after which it begins the process of deleting the information.