On Tuesday evening, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was briefly booted from the platform he helped co-found.
A number of users reported seeing a pop-up telling them Dorsey’s account had been suspended. The CEO, who is a prolific user of the service, had seemingly incurred the wrath of his own site.
Judging by the reactions from the Twitter community, onlookers were both amused and confused by the apparent error.
Moments later, when Dorsey’s account was restored, he had lost the majority of his 3.9 million followers. The CEO himself quickly cleared things up by tweeting that the error was an “internal mistake.” The same tweet also saw him channel his first ever post on the service: “just setting up twttr…again,” joked Dorsey.
The blunder marks the second time in a week that Twitter has made a high-profile mistake. On Thursday, Dorsey apologized after an ad for a neo-Nazi site accidentally made it on to the platform. Twitter blamed the slip-up on its “automated system.”
The site also suffered from a spate of hacks targeting celebrity profiles earlier this year. Twitter’s most popular user Katy Perry was one of the people targeted as part of the series of breaches, others included Drake, and Keith Richards.
The accidental suspension of the CEO begs the question: Could Dorsey’s account have been compromised? Even Silicon Valley entrepreneurs aren’t safe from hackers. Just take Mark Zuckerberg — the Facebook founder has had both his Twitter and Pinterest accounts breached this year.
The brief removal of Dorsey’s account comes in the wake of a series of account suspensions by the platform, targeting members of the alt-right. The move, which was viewed as a clampdown on free speech, sparked much criticism in the media and on the site itself.
