Mystery no more. The contractor who deactivated President Donald Trump's Twitter account for 11 minutes earlier this month has been identified by Tech Crunch as Bahtiyar Duysak.
The 20-something agreed to an interview with TechCrunch at his hometown in Germany. The interview, published Wednesday, can be viewed here.
Duysak, who was assigned to Twitter's customer support, told Tech Crunch the event was a "mistake." He said during his last day someone reported Trump's account, which he then decided to start the process of shutting down the president's account as a throwaway gesture before he bid Twitter farewell, according to TechCrunch.
He never thought Trump's account would actually get deactivated.
"If I am involved in this, then I really apologize if I hurt anyone," he said during the interview. "I didn’t do anything on purpose."
The incident captured headlines, set social media on fire, got the president to tweet about it and prompted the San Francisco-based company to conduct an internal review. Duysak has been called a so-called internet legend. He's even been nominated by the internet for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Local
"I don’t think he thought it was going to be such a big deal," TechCrunch reporter Tito Hamze said from Newark on Wednesday night.
Duysak is German of Turkish descent. He was a former member of the Turkish student association at Cal State East Bay.
He said he identified himself now because he doesn’t want to be looking over his shoulder any more.
"I just want to continue an ordinary life. I don’t want to flee from the media," he told TechCrunch. "I want to speak to my neighbors, I want to speak to my friends."
A Twitter spokesperson confirmed Duysak is a former employee and provided the following statement Wednesday:
"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. To protect our internal security measures, we don’t have further details to share at this time."
Read more at Tech Crunch.
