WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 (Xinhua) -- Social media website Twitter said Friday that it has taken security measures in response to a brief shutdown of U.S. President Donald Trump's personal account.
"We have implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again," Twitter said via its Twitter Government account.
The tweet was referring to an incident on Thursday when an employee cut off Trump's personal account for 11 minutes, creating confusion on social media.
Visitors to Trump's Twitter account were shown a message that said "sorry, that page doesn't exist!" around 7 p.m. local time Thursday, triggering speculations from a shutdown of his account to an internal coup at the White House.
Twitter later clarified that the employee that closed down the account was on his last day on the job, but did not elaborate whether the action was intentional.
The tech giant stopped there, saying "we won't be able to share all details about our internal investigation or updates to our security measures, but we take this seriously and our teams are on it."
The statement left many question from the tech community and Washington unanswered, including how many people had access to Trump's account and what were the security protocols in dealing with accounts of influential personalities, especially those related to U.S. national security.
The blackout incident came as Twitter is under mounting pressure for allegedly trying to sway last year's presidential election in Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's favor.
Sean Edgett, Twitter's general counsel, told the U.S. Senate in a recent hearing that the platform has hid tweets containing hashtags that were unfriendly to Clinton from searches.
"Our systems detected and hid just under half (48 percent) of the tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee," Edgett said.
Trump's Twitter account has 41.7 million followers, making him one of the influential characters on the U.S. social network.
Trump has often stirred up controversy with his tweets, making straightforward remarks or announcing domestic and foreign policies, which were rare among former presidents.
Critics say the president should be more careful of what he says, while the White House says the account gives him unfiltered access to his supporters.
