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ABC News
ABC News
World

Twitter employee uses last day at work to deactivate Trump's account

Twitter says it has launched a review of its policies after an employee used their last day in the job to deactivate US President Donald Trump's account.

Users who visited the US President's account were greeted with the message: "Sorry, that page doesn't exist".

The outage lasted for 11 minutes.

The account went down just after Mr Trump tweeted a video announcing the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve about 3:35pm.

An official statement from the @TwitterGov account initially said Mr Trump's account was "inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee".

In a second statement, the company said: "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."

In a similar incident last November, Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey's account was briefly suspended as a result of what he said was an internal mistake.

Twitter has faced calls to delete Mr Trump's account before.

But Twitter hasn't budged, saying it wouldn't delete his account or tweets threatening North Korea because it was "newsworthy" and in the public interest.

The President himself has also deleted individual tweets, something experts say is against the law but very unlikely to land him in trouble.

Other users on Twitter had plenty of fun with the ten minute outage:

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