Trump's Twitter Account Briefly Disappears

WASHINGTON (CBSLocal/AP) — President Donald Trump's Twitter account appeared to briefly disappear Thursday evening, but was back up and running soon afterward.

Late Thursday, Twitter said one of its employees was to blame.

Shortly before 7 p.m. Thursday, social media reports surfaced that the president's personal account, @RealDonaldTrump, was unavailable, providing the error message that the user "does not exist." The account was restored by 7:03 p.m.

The outage appeared to last under 10 minutes.

Twitter initially reported that "human error by a Twitter employee" was to blame for the outage. But an investigation later determined that it was "a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee's last day," Twitter said.

"We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again," Twitter said.

Representatives for the White House did immediately respond to requests for comment.

(© Copyright 2017 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)