Politics

Trump’s Twitter Account Disappeared For Three Minutes And The Internet Lost Its Mind

Where were you when Trump's Twitter went down?

by Sam Langford  3 November 2017
trump's twitter

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If you need another parable illustrating the toxicity of social media in this day and age, look no further: this morning, Trump’s Twitter account disappeared for literally three minutes, sparking massive chaos online before it turned out that actually nothing had happened.

Because I spend extraordinary amounts of time glued to Twitter, I witnessed this entire dramatic saga run its course. Here’s the play-by-play no one asked for.

The Beginning Of The End

It was a sunny 9:57 am in Sydney, or an equally sunny 3:57 pm in Washington, when someone sounded the alarm.

That tweeter was Jamie Ross of BuzzFeed Scotland, a subset of BuzzFeed I’ve never had to actually consider before now. While presumably casually scrolling the timeline, Ross stumbled across this:

It’s also possible that someone who is not Jamie Ross found this first, however we’re writing some #fakenews right now and this is the tweet I saw, so let’s go with it.

Basically, visiting Trump’s Twitter page just yielded a “sorry, that page doesn’t exist!” — the most exciting five words one could ever hope to find on @realDonaldTrump. Which led people to wonder…

Is It On??

Very quickly, the internet went fucking berserk. In the space of about three minutes, Ross’s tweet amassed almost 100 retweets, and spawned hundreds of hopeful/desperate/celebratory responses. Here’s a sample:

Narrator: It Was, In Fact, Not On

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. On the third minute, @realDonaldTrump rose again to crush the people’s hopes and dreams. Blink, take a bathroom break, or log off, and you’d have missed it.

Here’s a snapshot of dreams being shattered in real time:

The Part Of The Story With Some Actual Answers

Until like two minutes ago this part of the story was total speculation, but we now have some answers thanks to the good people at Twitter Government. In short, they’re claiming “human error by a Twitter employee”, which sounds suspiciously like some fucking legend seized a golden opportunity to do what we all wish we could.

As this legend responded:

If the Twitter employee responsible ends up reading this story by some miracle, please get in touch.

The Moral Of The Story

In a sentence? Log the fuck off.