Twitter employee shuts down Donald Trump's account on last day of work

A Twitter employee has deactivated the account of President Donald Trump on their last day of work at the company.

The 11-minute downtime occurred on the evening of Thursday 2 November, and was initially blamed on a human error. However, it later emerged the employee – who has not been named – was behind the deactivation of @realDonaldTrump, amid speculations it was done on purpose.

"Earlier today @realdonaldtrump's account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee. 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," Twitter said in a statement.

The company later added: "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. We are conducting a full internal review."

There have been calls to ban Trump from Twitter, a platform the president often uses to issue controversial statements and criticise his adversaries.

The president stirred criticism after he took to Twitter to threaten North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, after a series of fiery exchanges between the two leaders.

Twitter suspends accounts if they are abusive, they have been hacked, or they are fake.

The company previously suspended the accounts of high-profile users including right-wing political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, who was permanently banned from the platform after he tweeted a series of abusive posts targeting actress Leslie Jones.

Singer Azealia Banks was also banned following a series of racist and homophobic posts against pop singer Zayn Malik.