Employee takes down Trump — on Twitter

It was a last-day-at-work prank like no other.

For 11 minutes yesterday, Donald Trump’s Twitter account was mysteriously offline.

Instead of seeing the usual rants and declarations, users were confronted by a different message: “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”

Although it had his trademark exclamation mark, the apology made clear the President’s Twitter account had disappeared.

Twitter later apologised, saying in a tweet: “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 in an earlier tweet: “We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s absence on the socialmedia site was met with shock as the news spread among the leader’s 41.7 million followers and beyond.

But it didn’t last long.

The moment has arguably gone down in annals of presidential social media history.

Trump is a prolific — and controversial — Twitter user.

On Thursday, he called for the New York attacker to be put to death — an intervention that some feared could impact the trail. In September, North Korea accused him of declaring war via the social media site when he warned leader Kim Jong Un “won’t be around much longer”.

But the President has defended his use of Twitter, saying he may not have won the US election without it.

“When somebody, says something about me, I am able to go bing, bing, bing and I take care of it. The other way, I would never be able to get the word out,” he said in an interview with Fox News recently.