As is traditional for many companies, smartphone maker Huawei’s Twitter account wished its followers a Happy New Year. Unfortunately, the tweet came from an iPhone.
The two Huawei employee that were responsible for the tweet that showed as “via Twitter for iPhone” quickly deleted it. However, the internet being the internet, a screenshot of the tweet went viral, and caught the attention of the Huawei powers that be.
That was fast pic.twitter.com/y6k0FJF7Gq
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) January 1, 2019
Huawei’s corporate senior vice president and director of the board Chen Lifang sent out an internal memo on January 3, announcing punishments for the two employees involved in the tweet. Reuters first saw and shared the memo:
In an internal Huawei memo dated Jan. 3 seen by Reuters, corporate senior vice-president and director of the board Chen Lifang said, “the incident caused damage to the Huawei brand”.
The mistake occurred when outsourced social media handler Sapient experienced “VPN problems” with a desktop computer so used an iPhone with a roaming SIM card in order to send the message on time at midnight, Huawei said in the memo.
The memo said the two employees were demoted by one rank and their monthly salaries were reduced by by 5,000 yuan, (approximately $728). The company has also frozen the pay rank of its digital marketing director for 1 year.
Huawei isn’t the first Apple competitor to be embarrassed by a “via Twitter for iPhone” gaffe. Over the years, Samsung has had several employees tweet from an iPhone.
This also isn’t the first time Huawei has faced embarrassment, as Wonder Woman actress and Huawei brand ambassador Gal Gadot posted a sponsored tweet promoting the Huawei Mate 10 from, you guessed it, an iPhone.
(Via MacRumors)
