President Donald Trump's Twitter account was deleted overnight on November 2, severing his preferred method of communication with the world — and his 41 million followers — for 11 minutes.

At first Twitter blamed "human error" for the deletion of the 45th president. But after two hours of investigation Twitter said it was deliberately deleted by an employee on their last day at the company.

The social network's ominous-sounding 'Twitter Government' account at first said: "Earlier today, @realdonalstrump's account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee. The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored. We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again."

Two hours later, Twitter followed up by saying: "Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee's last day. We are concluding a full internal review."

During those 11 minutes, visiting Trump's account returned the message "Sorry, that page doesn't exist!"

Trump did not tweet about the incident at the time, but said the next day: "My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee. I guess the word must finally be getting out-and having an impact."

While the meaning of his tweet was not entirely clear, others on Twitter were quick to comment about the missing account.

"Trump's Twitter account vanishing and then reappearing moments later is the best evidence yet that the events of the past two years are the result of warring sects of time travellers," said an account called Nfinit.

"Let's hope it was an A/B test and will be rolling out sitewide soon" said another account, called Dr. Time.