Trump's Twitter account was deactivated for 11 minutes because of a disgruntled employee - here are the best reactions

For 11 minutes on Thursday night, the world experienced a first: US President Donald Trump was not on Twitter.

Trump's account was temporarily kicked offline by a Twitter employee. At first, Twitter said it was an "inadvertent" human error. The company followed up a couple of hours later, however, and said the incident was caused by a "customer support employee who did this on the employee's last day of work," suggesting it might not have been an accident.

Trump critics quickly cheered the nameless Twitter support staffer as a hero; others laughed at the incident as one more humorous episode in a year in which politics-as-usual has become the theater of the absurd.