The ex-Twitter employee who shut Donald Trump’s account for 11 minutes says it was a ‘mistake’

UPDATED : Thursday, 30 Nov 2017, 11:48AM

A German man has come forward as the former Twitter Inc employee who shut down the account of US President Donald Trump for 11 minutes this month on his last day of work at the social network.

The technology news website TechCrunch published an interview on Wednesday with Bahtiyar Duysak, whom it called a 20-something with Turkish roots who was born and raised in Germany. He was a temporary contract worker in San Francisco for Twitter, the website said.

Duysak, who had not previously been identified as the person behind the takedown, told TechCrunch that he considered Trump’s temporary silencing a “mistake” and never thought the account would get deactivated.

It was not a planned act, he said. Rather, he said, the chance to close the account fell into his lap near the end of his scheduled final shift, and he decided to take it.

“There are millions of people who would take actions against him if they had the possibility. In my case, it was just random,” Duysak said in a video of the interview posted online. He wore a grey jumper emblazoned with the American flag.

Twitter on Wednesday would not confirm whether Duysak was the ex-employee in question or answer other questions.

BuzzFeed News, citing two anonymous sources, reported separately that Duysak was the ex-employee responsible.

incident like this from happening again.”

Duysak did not shed much light on the incident. Near the end of his last day at the San Francisco-based company, an alert came to him that someone had reported Trump’s account for an unspecified violation, he said.

Duysak put the wheels in motion to deactivate it, TechCrunch said, although the account did not go offline until hours later. Neither Duysak nor TechCrunch explained the delay.

“I didn’t hack anyone. I didn’t do anything which I wasn’t authorised to do,” he said.

Duysak acknowledged that he only wanted to clear the air despite Twitter and the media wanting to know more information about him.

“I want to continue an ordinary life. I don’t want to flee from the media,” he said.

“I didn’t do any crime or anything evil, but I feel like Pablo Escobar.”