The rogue Twitter employee who briefly banned Trump's account explains how and why it happened

A man named Bahtiyar Duysak believes he was the Twitter employee who deactivated Trump's account for 11 minutes earlier this month.
He's not a US citizen and no longer lives in the US.
He describes the situation as "a mistake."

For 11 minutes earlier this month, President Trump's Twitter account was deactivated. And the world has been searching ever since for the so-called rogue employee who did the deed as a parting gesture on his last day of work.


His name is apparently Bahtiyar Duysak, and because journalists have been turning his life upside down since that fateful day, he has come forward with this interview with TechCrunch's Khaled Hamze.

He describes the situation as basically "a mistake."

Shortly before the end of his last day working in Twitter's department that handles reports of bad behavior, a report on Trump's twitter account came in. Almost as an afterthought, Duysak went ahead and set the procedures in motion to deactivate the account, not believing that it actually would be, TechCrunch reports.

He closed his computer and left Twitter's San Francisco headquarters for good, he told TechCrunch. He believed there were protections in place to protect this account and other high profile accounts like it.

Several hours later, he discovered it was actually deactivated when a woman approached him asking about it. She had apparently been contacted by someone trying to track him down, TechCrunch reports.

Since then journalists who suspected he was the employee responsible have been combing through his life trying to reach him, contacting everyone and anyone from his college friends to his family trying to speak to him, he said.

Duysak is not a US citizen and is no longer in the US. He's back in his home country of Germany. He said he decided to come forward and talk to the press so he could get back to an "ordinary life. I don't want to flee from the media."

A number of coincidences with very little probabilities
When asked for comment on Duysak's version of events, a Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider:

"We won't have a comment on a former employee. We have taken a number of steps to keep an incident like this from happening again. In order to protect our internal security measures we don't have further details to share at this time."

While Duysak has come forward, his account does not fully explain the troubling incident. It's not really clear, for instance, why Duysak triggered the process to deactivate Trump's account if he didn't believe it would actually do anything.

Instead of a full explanation for his motives, he offered only a cryptic assertion:

"It’s all about a number of coincidences, with very, very little probabilities that randomly occurred on my last day."

Here is Duysak talking about how it all happened and what his life has been like ever since.