President Donald Trump on Friday tweeted a mystifying response to the temporary deletion of his Twitter account by a rogue employee.
Trump’s early-morning tweet confirmed that his personal account, @realdonaldtrump, suffered an 11-minute outage the previous night, which the company blamed on a departing Twitter employee.
“I guess the word must finally be getting out-and having an impact,” Trump added inscrutably. He didn’t clarify what “word” was getting out, and why it was impactful.
The temporary outage was long enough for fellow tweeters to notice, and they responded by posting jokes about the situation.
Twitter initially called the deletion of the president’s account a result of “human error.” The company later revealed it “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 company added.
Many of the president’s critics, and even some of his supporters, have decried his bullying habits on Twitter. Trump often uses the platform to attack his enemies, including fellow politicians and news media outlets.
Some users have criticized Twitter for not suspending the president’s account, claiming he violates user guidelines that prohibit threats of violence.
In one tweet, the president threatened that North Korea “won’t be around much longer” if its leadership allowed hostile rhetoric against the United States to continue. North Korea’s government called it a declaration of war.
But Twitter refused to suspend or ban Trump’s account after the posting.
“We hold all accounts to the same Rules, and consider a number of factors when assessing whether Tweets violate our Rules,” the company said. “Among the considerations is ‘newsworthiness’ and whether a Tweet is of public interest.”