Trump briefly vanished from Twitter, users rejoiced
For about 11 minutes yesterday, the account of US President Donald Trump, an active Twitter user, disappeared. No one knew what happened, but speculation was rife: many forwarded theories about how a "rogue" Twitter employee might have been behind it. Finally, two hours later, Twitter's Government and Elections team, which had initially blamed "human error", confirmed the rumors. For those minutes though, Twitterati rejoiced.
For a few moments, people thought it had finally happened
Calls to ban Trump on Twitter have abounded since before he became president. Even after taking office in November'16, he has made sexist rants, racist rants, bullied people, threatened North Korea and spread blatantly false information, critics say. Once he tweeted: "I love Twitter.... it's like owning your own newspaper- without the losses." So initially, many thought the platform had finally suspended his account.
Turns out he wasn't banned. So what happened?
When Twitter suspends accounts, the page says "account suspended", but Trump's account showed: "Sorry, this page doesn't exist!" Then started speculations: maybe he had himself deactivated his account. Maybe he had been hacked: he still uses his old Android phone instead of a secure device.
Irrespective, Twitterati celebrated the unexpected development
Happy Twitterati celebrated: "I think we just came together as a nation for 23 seconds," said @mad_hill. "Those few minutes were like when Andy played the opera record over the Shawshank PA system," posted @nycsouthpaw. "Trump's twitter account vanishing and then reappearing is the best evidence yet that events of the past 2 years are the result of warring sects of time-travelers," tweeted @Nfinit.
With his account restored, Trump's back in action again
Finally, @TwitterGov solved the mystery: "Through our investigation we learned 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 account has since been restored. Trump is back to tweeting. His first post was about the Republican Party's tax cuts plan. Life's back to normal for his 41.7mn followers.
