5 lessons for brands from the Burger King Twitter hack
The company regained control of its Twitter feed on Monday night after hackers overtook it for hours. Here’s what brands need to know.
Around 10 p.m. ET, Burger King tweeted:
Interesting day here at BURGER KING®, but we’re back! Welcome to our new followers. Hope you all stick around!
— BurgerKing (@BurgerKing) February 19, 2013
The breach began in the morning on Monday and lasted for hours. Hackers tweeted a flurry of messages, most of them made little sense and contained offensive language. By the afternoon, Twitter had suspended the account. Burger King did not update its Facebook page on Monday, though it did release this statement to the media:
“We have worked directly with administrators to suspend the account until we are able to re-establish our legitimate site and authentic postings. We apologize to our fans and followers who have been receiving erroneous tweets about other members of our industry and additional inappropriate topics.”
Anyone who’s managed a brand account can certainly empathize. In the hours after the hack, even McDonald’s tweeted from its verified account:
We empathize with our @burgerking counterparts. Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking.
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