Donald Trump silenced on Twitter by 'rogue' worker

A "rogue" Twitter employee working a final shift at the social network shut down US President Donald Trump's account - but only for 11 minutes.

Shortly before 11pm UK time the president's personal account, @RealDonaldTrump, showed an error message saying the user "does not exist".

The company said it had launched a review after the account - which has more than 41 million followers - was made unavailable by a "Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee's last day".

Before that statement, the San Franciso-based company had said: "Earlier today @realdonaldtrump's account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee."

There was praise on the network for the employee, and the president himself made light of the outage, tweeting on Friday: "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."

Following that tweet he launched into a tirade of messages against regular targets including "Crooked Hillary" and "the Dems".

Praise for the Twitter employee came from vocal Trump critic Ted Lieu, a Democratic member of Congress, who tweeted: "Dear Twitter employee who shut down Trump's Twitter: You made America feel better for 11 minutes. DM me & I will buy you a Pizza Hut pizza."

Meanwhile, former Republican member of Congress, David Jolly, wrote: "Just gonna say it, the employee at Twitter who shut off Trump's account for 11 mins could become a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize."

Other praise came from @Christopher_Laudando, who wrote: "Employee of the Decade" while @dustin_hughes asked: "Can I contribute to the beer fund for this hero?"

Not everybody was celebrating the news, however. @GOPPollAnalyst wrote: "Why does a Twitter customer support employee have enough access to delete the President of the United States account? WTF".

And @deray tweeted: "I hope that the lives of the existing Twitter employees don't become harder as the result of the one person deactivating Trump's account."