For 11 minutes Thursday night, @realdonaldtrump was replaced by a blue screen bearing a notice that the account no longer existed.
The Twitter account that had been used to attack judges who blocked Trump's executive orders, taunt the leader of North Korea and pressure other Republicans to fall in line with presidential policy went silent.
Like the summer's covfefe incident, which went hours without a revision or response, it stoked a flurry of theories. Had Trump been hacked? Had his fingers slipped? Had one of the many White House staffers said to be frustrated with his social media use taken the issue into their own hands?
Then the eclipse passed. The account reappeared, and Twitter administrators explained it had been inadvertently deleted by a staff member.
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
The company later announced the deletion had been the work of a customer service employee on his or her last day of work.
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
The president celebrated the restoration of his stream-of-consciousness-posting privileges by tweeting about his party's tax reform initiative, a piece of legislation viewed by some Republicans as their last chance at a major accomplishment in governing before the 2018 midterm elections.
Great Tax Cut rollout today. The lobbyists are storming Capital Hill, but the Republicans will hold strong and do what is right for America!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017
And the status quo of 2017 was restored. The end.
