Twitter CEO, @jack was suspended briefly before being reinstated with some curiously messed-up follower counts.
The Twitter account for Jack Dorsey, the social media company's co-founder and CEO, vanished briefly Wednesday night before reappearing with significantly fewer followers than before.
Attempts to visit Dorsey's account around 6 p.m. PT yielded a standard message indicating his account had been suspended. About 15 minutes later, the account mysteriously reappeared, but instead of the more than 4 million followers Dorsey previously had, his number of followers was pared down to a very modest 142.
It wasn't immediately clear what caused the vanishing act or the shrinkage in followers. Twitter representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
It's been a rough year for Twitter. Rumors swirled for weeks that Google, Salesforce, Disney and Apple were interested in buying the financially troubled social network, but nothing came of it.
Twitter has struggled to expand its user base, even as it adds features such as livestreams of political debates and sports events. On top of that, the San Francisco-based company announced last month it would cut up to 9 percent of its work force.
Earlier this month, Twitter's chief operating officer, Adam Bain, left the company.
But if Dorsey's followers thought things were over for the exec, they were quickly reassured.
"Just setting up my twttr...again (account suspension was an internal mistake)," he wrote in a tweet, less than an hour after his account was suspended.
Even with no indication of what that internal mistake was, no doubt Dorsey was eager to reassure his followers he hadn't been hacked. By Wednesday morning, his number of followers stood at more than 2.7 million.
Whatever happened, it's clear that when the boss of a social media company goes offline, things get sorted pretty darned quickly.
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