Twitter has confirmed Sean Hannity’s Twitter account was hacked before disappearing for a few hours on Saturday morning.
After Hannity’s verified Twitter account posted a message late Friday that simply and cryptically said ‘Form Submission 1649,’ visitors said they were getting a ‘Sorry, that page doesn’t exist’ error message.
By the time Hannity’s account was back up later in the morning on Saturday, speculation was rampant about the mysterious disappearance.
Fox News referred questions to Twitter, which confirmed the account had been compromised.
‘While we normally do not discuss individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons, we have permission from the account owner to confirm that account was briefly compromised,’ Twitter said by email, without elaborating.
Fox News host Sean Hannity’s Twitter account was compromised and was unavailable for a few hours on Saturday
This tweet, which has since been deleted, appeared late on Friday, shortly before Hannity’s Twitter account was deactivated for several hours
Hannity was locked out of his account for several hours before returning to post this tweet
Hannity resumed control of the account, tweeting on Saturday evening: ‘I’m baaaccckk… a lot to say- Thanks for the support all you deplorable, irredeemables.
‘Can’t get rid of me that easy. Too much work to do exposing #deepstategate—Monday’s a big day…tick tock.’
Hannity, who hosts a weeknight talk show, is a staunch conservative who regularly defends President Donald Trump and rails against liberals.
Some Hannity followers blamed the hacking on shadowy ‘deep state’ government figures looking to take down Hannity.
‘The Deep State is in panic!’ tweeted Alex Jones, a far-right radio show host. ‘Hannity disappears from Twitter after eerie tweet.’
Hannity, who hosts a weeknight talk show, is a staunch conservative who regularly defends President Donald Trump and rails against liberals
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange took to Twitter to observe how Hannity had his account ‘mysteriously disappear.’
Other users proposed the theory that a rogue Twitter employee was behind the deactivation.
That was Twitter’s explanation for an 11-minute outage that took down the Republican president’s twitter account in November.
At the time, Twitter blamed a customer support worker on his or her last day on the job and said it was implementing safeguards to prevent the situation from happening again.
Bahtiyar Duysak, a German national of Turkish origin who was employed in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters on a temporary work visa, later came forward as the man who briefly silenced the president.