Twitter has restored the account of a journalist following a user backlash sparked by his suspension from the social network. Guy Adams' account was blocked after he criticised NBCUniversal's coverage of the Olympic Games and posted the email address of one of its executives.

Guy Adams, a Los Angeles correspondent for The Independent newspaper, violated Twitter's privacy policy, which prohibits users from revealing other users' private information, according to an email that Adams said he received from Twitter.

Mr Adams said NBC had only complained about the message after Twitter alerted the broadcaster to it.

Mr Adams said Twitter had told him that his account had been reactivated following "an update from the complainant retracting their original request".

A blog post by Twitter's lawyer said it was standard practice to temporarily suspend an account that had posted private information which could be used "to harass or intimidate".

However, he added that the networks' workers had strayed beyond guidelines saying they should not instigate a complaints procedure themselves.

"We want to apologise for the part of this story that we did mess up," wrote Alex Macgillivray.

"The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership did proactively identify a tweet that was in violation of the Twitter rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with our trust and safety team to report the violation, as has now been reported publicly."