Trump’s Twitter cut off

Rogue worker’s final act

US President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes yesterday by a rogue employee on their last day of employment.

Twitter confirmed the cause of the outage to Mr Trump’s account — which has more than 41 million followers — and said a review was ongoing.

“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,” Twitter said.

The rogue employee was not named.

Twitter had initially said the take-down was caused by “human error.”

During the brief period of downtime, anyone going to the @realDonaldTrump Twitter page would see the message, “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”

Mr Trump has made extensive use of Twitter to attack his opponents and promote his policies, during the 2016 presidential campaign and since taking office in January.

Mr Trump has drawn criticism for his tweets about the Manhattan terror attack. He tweeted that Sayfullo Saipov, the alleged perpetrator of the attack, “should get the death penalty”, despite not having been through the judicial system.

Experts told NBC News Mr Trump’s tweets could make it harder for prosecutors in the case against Mr Saipov.

In the past, campaigns have been launched for Twitter to act against Mr Trump’s account for apparently violating its rules.