A few hours after the official Metrobus Twitter account was suspended without explanation on Tuesday afternoon, the account was reinstated.
But a full day later, it's not any clearer why the social media platform banned an account dedicated to public transit updates.
The official Washington Metro Transit Authority account announced the return of @metrobusinfo about 7:40 p.m. on Tuesday.
".@metrobusinfo is back up and running," the tweet read. "We are still in coordination with Twitter to investigate the exact reason it happened. Thank you for your patience."
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The Metrobus account also celebrated its return, but warned followers that their transit alerts may be limited as the account got back on board.
"Thank you for being patient, our account is re-instated," Metrobus said. "Tweets may be limited for the next 24 hours as we work with Twitter to understand why this account was suspended."
Metro is still attempting to figure out what led to the account's suspension in the first place.
"Twitter sent a standard email response to us regarding our suspension," Metrobus said in a statement. "While their response allows us to eliminate some potential reasons for the suspension, no definitive answer was provided about our specific account. We are working on a strategy to mitigate suspension in the future based on the limited information available at this time."
Metro General Manager Randy Clarke expressed frustration about the situation on his own account on Tuesday night.
"I could make lots of snarky comments but the reality is if Twitter is going to serve as a public forum it should be obvious that real time transit info should never be shutdown," Clarke said in a tweet. "And a reason should be publicly given so we can all learn and prevent another occurrence."
"Account suspended: Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter Rules," read a message in the space where tweets would normally appear on the @metrobusinfo Twitter profile, when the account was banned Tuesday afternoon.
It was not immediately clear what, if anything, the Metrobus account did to violate the Twitter rules. Policies listed on the webpage for those rules pertain to safety, privacy and authenticity.
It was also not immediately clear when the suspension took place that it was a temporary ban.
Asked on Tuesday whether WMATA had any insight into why the Metrobus account was suspended or the timeframe for its restoration, the transit authority said "We're looking into this and working to resolve it asap."
NBC Washington reached out to Twitter for comment, but direct messages to the Twitter Communications account failed to deliver on multiple attempts across Tuesday and Wednesday.
