Routine social media customer service turned into a not-safe-for-work nightmare today for U.S. Airways. During an exchange with a disgruntled customer, the company’s Twitter account replied with a link to a pornographic twitpic image.
Although the tweet was a reply and therefore didn’t appear on the timeline of all @USAirways‘ 418,000 followers, it was sensational enough to pick up serious viral steam.
The tweet, which was deleted within the hour, was up long enough for countless screen-grab opportunities and Deadspin, and other chroniclers of Internet mayhem, quickly followed up with posts [Warning: Link is extremely NSFW]. The hashtag #usairways was trending on Twitter for much of the day.
After deleting the tweet, U.S. Airways apologized on Twitter:
We apologize for an inappropriate image recently shared as a link in one of our responses. We’ve removed the tweet and are investigating. — US Airways (@USAirways) April 14, 2014
Postscript: Here’s a little more detail for those of you asking How could this happen?
The airline’s explanation isn’t very enlightening:
We apologize for the inappropriate image we recently shared in a Twitter response. Our investigation has determined that the image was initially posted to our Twitter feed by another user. We captured the tweet to flag it as inappropriate. Unfortunately the image was inadvertently included in a response to a customer. We immediately realized the error and removed our tweet. We deeply regret the mistake and we are currently reviewing our processes to prevent such errors in the future.
In fact, the x-rated photo was posted by an online prankster and directed at the Twitter account of U.S. Airways parent company American Airlines at 1:59 p.m. Eastern. About a half hour later, the url of the hard-core twitpic somehow wound up on two replies from the U.S. Airways Twitter account.
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