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The identity of the former Twitter employee who, on his last day of work, deleted US President Donald Trump’s account, has been revealed.
He is Bahtiyar Duysak, a German in his 20s.
He worked at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. He worked in customer support with the Trust & Safety division, the team that reviews alerts of bad behaviour on the platform.
Duysak said the move was an unintentional mistake.
He told TechCrunch that he was near the end of his last day working for Twitter when an alert came in about Trump’s account.
As a final gesture, he started the process of deactivating the account, closed his computer and left the building.
He didn’t expect the process to actually be completed, he said, but it was.
Then shortly before 7pm on Thursday, November 2, the president’s personal account, @RealDonaldTrump, became unavailable, providing the error message that the user ‘does not exist.’
Twitter restored the account 11 minutes later and took responsibility for the outage.
In a statement, the company admitted that the deactivation “was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day.”
READ: Employee deactivated Donald Trump’s account – Twitter
Duysak said: “I had a wild time in America. I was tired sometimes and everyone can make mistakes.
“It might be that I had a mistake but there are of course, not just one mistake by one human can create this end result.’
He added: ‘I didn’t hack anyone. I didn’t do anything that I wasn’t authorised to do.’
Twitter declined to confirm that Duysak was responsible for the deletion but said the company has “taken a number of steps to keep an incident like this from happening again.”
Many took to Twitter to praise the former employee on his final job for the company.
But others raised concerns about security on the site.
At the time, Twitter said it was conducting a full internal review and implementing safeguards to prevent incidents like this in the future.