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Trump has 41.7 million followers on Twitter and has made
extensive use of it to send messages attacking his opponents and
promoting his policies, both during the 2016 presidential
campaign and since taking office in January.
"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
a tweet.
"We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to
prevent this from happening again," the company said in an
earlier tweet.
A Twitter representative declined to comment further.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for
comment.
In his first tweet after Thursday's outage, Trump wrote, "Great
Tax Cut rollout today. The lobbyists are storming Capital Hill,
but the Republicans will hold strong and do what is right for
America!"
Thursday evening's incident raises a host of questions about how
Twitter secures Trump's personal account, the official @potus
presidential account and other accounts that could potentially
influence world events.
It comes at a moment when technology companies, including
Twitter, face sharp attack from U.S. lawmakers for failing to
stem the spread of Russian propaganda and misinformation on
their platforms.
Twitter, in particular, has long faced criticism for not doing
enough to police its platform and respond to complaints of
abuse.
The temporary deletion of the Trump account sparked a flood of
criticism on Twitter itself. Reuters could not determine how
many Twitter employees had the authority to delete accounts or
tamper with them in other ways, such as by sending counterfeit
Tweets.
Twitter declined to provide further details.
(Reporting by David Ingram and Jonathan Weber; Additional
reporting by Shalini Nagarajan; Writing by Mohammad Zargham;
Editing by Sandra Maler and Clarence Fernandez)
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