November 2016: the month that Facebook ‘killed’ its CEO Mark Zuckerberg (and a bunch of other users) and Twitter suspended its CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey.
That’s right, social media glitches have embarrassed two of the world’s premier social networks lately. Hot on the heels of Facebook briefly pronouncing its founder as dead, so today Dorsey — the visionary behind Twitter’s inception and driving force for its development — was suspended from the service he helped create for hours.
Former TechCrunch’er Drew Olanoff was among those to notice that @jack was no longer reachable:
So the CEO of Twitter is suspended. On Twitter. pic.twitter.com/XCC2MP4EDJ
— drew olanoff ? (@yoda) November 23, 2016
Twitter recently dropped the hammer and suspended a number of ‘alt-right’ figures from using its service, and it appears that its own CEO was locked out for around two to three hours. Dorsey reprised his famous first tweet with a message explaining that there had been an “internal mistake”:
just setting up my twttr…again (account suspension was an internal mistake)
— ??jack (@jack) November 23, 2016
We’ve contacted Twitter for more details, but let’s hope whoever made the “mistake” is on the end of some Thanksgiving-inspired forgiveness and not looking for a new job. For those who believe Twitter could do a much better job managing abuse and protecting its users, even after 10 years online and much-needed recent reforms, this story is a fairly apt piece of symbolism.
Featured Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
