A Twitter employee's heroic last act before leaving was to deactivate Donald Trump's account

A Twitter employee deactivated Donald Trump’s Twitter account on their last day of work on Thursday, meaning the US president was unable to tweet for 11 minutes.

The @realDonaldTrump account, which has 41.7 million followers, went down just before 4pm Pacific time (11pm GMT). During the 11-minute outage, anyone trying to visit Trump’s personal account would see the message: “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”

Twitter initially said the account had been accidentally deactivated “due to human error by a Twitter employee”.

https://twitter.com/TwitterGov/status/926238960594178048

But soon afterwards, the company then tweeted another statement explaining that an employee actually deactivated the account on their final day in the job – which would suggest that it was done on purpose.

https://twitter.com/TwitterGov/status/926267806261407744

Twitter users have been quick to celebrate the employee's audacity...

https://twitter.com/sahluwal/status/926331037000417280

https://twitter.com/aljwhite/status/926364623078612992

https://twitter.com/abcnews/status/926278286233059328

https://twitter.com/ollyog/status/926368889415651328

https://twitter.com/Jamie_Rose_Duke/status/926368701305294849

https://twitter.com/harrypalmer285/status/926368492391161856

Trump's love of the social network and his penchant for late night tweeting is well known. He has sent more than 36,000 tweets since he joined the network in 2009.

In the past year, Trump has used the platform to air his various grievances against Hollywood, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un and the national press, to name a few.