Trump deleted from Twitter!

Worker’s last-day stunt lasts just 11 mins... but raises security concerns

FOR 11 minutes, it seemed that the impossible had happened – Donald Trump had been silenced on social media.

Anyone who tried to view the US President’s personal Twitter account just before 11pm UK time on Thursday was taken to an error message saying the user ‘does not exist’.

Yet the sudden outage wasn’t an act of contrition from Mr Trump, but an act of defiance from a ‘rogue’ Twitter employee, who deleted the President’s profile on his last day at work.

Although brief, the deactivation of Mr Trump’s account, @realDonaldTrump – which he uses as a mouthpiece to air his unfiltered views – caused a stir online.

Some of Mr Trump’s critics were quick to praise the unknown worker. Ted Lieu, a Democratic member of Congress, promised to buy the employee a pizza, posting: ‘Dear Twitter employee who shut down Trump’s Twitter: You made America feel better for 11 minutes.’

And former Republican congressman David Jolly wrote: ‘Just gonna say it, the employee at Twitter who shut off Trump’s account for 11 mins could become a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.’

The President himself even made light of the outage, tweeting yesterday: ‘My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee. I guess the word must finally be getting out – and having an impact.’

Following that post, Mr Trump resumed normal activity, launching into a tirade of messages against regular targets, including ‘crooked Hillary’.

He has sent more than 36,000 tweets from his account, which is followed by more than 41million people.

However, not everybody was celebrating the news, with some raising security concerns.

Blake Hounshell, the editorin- chief of Politico Magazine, wrote: ‘It is shocking that some random Twitter employee could shut down the President’s account.’

He added: ‘Seriously, what if this person had tweeted about a fictional nuclear strike on North Korea?’

A statement from Twitter said the account was made unavailable by a ‘customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day’, and it is conducting a ‘ full internal review’ into the incident.