Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey‘s account on his own company’s platform disappeared shortly on Wednesday night before reappearing with significantly fewer followers than before. What caused the decline in followers or the vanishing of the account was not immediately clear.
Dorsey blames “internal error”
Around 6 p.m., when attempts to visit Dorsey’s account were made, a standard message indicated that his account had been suspended.
The message read, “Error. The account you are trying to view has been suspended.”
Dorsey’s account mysteriously reappeared about 15 minutes later. But instead of the more than 4 million followers that Dorsey had previously, his number of followers had dropped to 145.
As of now, there have been no comments from Twitter on this strange event. We do not know the actual reason for suspending the account of the co-founder, but it is possible that Dorsey was the target of a hacking attempt and his account suspended for a short time to preemptively stop any kind of public performance while the social network worked to get it back into his hands.
However, Dorsey himself ended speculations surrounding his account suspension. Just before 11 p.m. Eastern, Dorsey addressed his short intermission and claimed that it was an “internal mistake.”
just setting up my twttr…again (account suspension was an internal mistake)
— jack (@jack) November 23, 2016
Twitter banned several prominent figures from the so-called “alt-right” movement last week. White nationalist Richard Spencer called that action “corporate Stalinism.” Several users associated with the group celebrated the suspension of Dorsey’s account on Tuesday, noted Gizmodo.
One user wrote, “AHAHA @Jack Dorsey got suspended from his own platform ???”
A rough year for Twitter
It has been a rough year for the micro-blogging site. There were rumors for weeks that Salesforce, Apple, Google and Disney were interested in buying the financially-troubled social media platform, but nothing came of them. More recently, the buyout rumors were triggered again after hedge fund Jana Partners announced that it was buying a stake in Twitter. Jana Partners, however, is acquiring a small stake which is less than 1% of Twitter’s outstanding share count.
Twitter has been struggling for a long time to expand its user base. The social network even added features like live-streams of sports and political debates to increase its user base, but so far not much has changed. Last month, the San Francisco-based company declared that it would cut around 9% of its global work force.
On Tuesday, Twitter shares closed up 0.16% at $18.63. Year to date, the stock is down more than 19%, while in the last six months, it is up more than 29%.
