Twitter employee deactivates President Trump’s Twitter account

President Donald Trump's Twitter account was temporarily removed yesterday by a Twitter employee.

Trump's @realDonaldTrump account went down for 11 minutes last afternoon, and the reason was initially not clear. Twitter later tweeted that it was due to ''human error,'' and the company was investigating further.

In a tweet last night, Twitter confirmed deactivation of the account ''by a Twitter customer support employee on his last day at work".

According to commentators, the fact that a single Twitter employee could remove the account of the most powerful Twitter user on the planet is startling, to say the least, but according to two sources familiar with the company, employees on Twitter's Trust and Safety team, had the ability to suspend or remove accounts. However, according to a second source this is limited.

This source went on to add that Twitter once considered a safeguard in which it would require two employees to remove important, notable Twitter accounts, but it was not implemented.

Another source said Twitter's top employees, including the CEO, could not automatically delete accounts, as these are monitored via what are essentially dashboards at the company.

However, they point out that it is not clear whether Twitter had a special plan in place for Trump's account, which is undoubtedly the most high-profile one on the platform, either to protect it or suspend it if he or those who tweet for him did anything to violate terms of service.

During the brief period of downtime, shortly before 4pm Pacific time (11pm GM), people looking up the @realDonaldTrump Twitter page would see the message ''Sorry, that page doesn't exist!''

Twitter first said the 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,'' the company said in a statement.

But the company's @Twittergov account, in another statement revealed that the outage was due to employee sabotage.

''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,'' the new statement said.