For a very brief time on Thursday, the world saw what life would be like without President Donald Trump being on Twitter.
The president's prolific @RealDonaldTrump account disappeared for 11 minutes on Thursday, leading fellow tweeters to wonder if the leader of the free world had been hacked — or perhaps banned — by Twitter.
At first Twitter said that it was just "human error" that led to Trump briefly being dumped from his favorite platform.
"Earlier today @realdonaldtrump’s account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee," Twitter said in a statement. "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."
Later, however, the social-media giant revealed the controlled alt-delete was done by a departing employee who was trying to go out with a virtual bang.
"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," Twitter wrote. "We are conducting a full internal review."
Trump was back on Twitter after his brief and accidental time-out. He responded to the social media snafu early Friday, suggesting that what he's saying is "finally" being noticed.
"My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee. I guess the word must finally be getting out-and having an impact," he tweeted.
But quite a few Twitter users admitted they would never forget the "minutes of peace" they had while Trump was offline.