Trump's Twitter account deactivated for nearly 10 minutes

President Donald Trump's Twitter account disappeared briefly this morning, but is now back up and running.

Shortly before 7pm Thursday local time in the United States, social media reports surfaced that the president's personal account, @realDonaldTrump, was unavailable, providing the error message that the user "does not exist."

Quelle horreur! The Tweeter-in-Chief was off-air.

The account was restored by 7.03pm. It is not clear what caused the outage, which appeared to last under 10 minutes.

And it has now emerged that, surprise, surprise, it was not a glitch - but a deliberate act.

A Twitter employee decided to take out the President's social media platform of choice on their last working day.

It's not clear whether it was a he or she responsible.

Twitter have promised a "full internal review" of the incident.

The official account did not acknowledge that it had been shut down, tweeting about tax cuts 30 minutes later.

The white-out occurred on the same day the president came under fire for his social media activity, following his Tweets calling for the New York terror attacker to receive the death penalty.

While it seems the account's deactivation was a staff error, Twitter uses took the opportunity to poke fun at the situation.