Huawei punishes its employees for iPhone tweet blunder
Chinese smartphone technology company Huawei has punished two of its employees for sending New Year greetings on the Huawei's official Twitter account using an iPhone, which was showed in an internal memo showed.
On New Year's Day, Huawei employees went on to wish followers a “Happy #2019” in a tweet marked sent “via Twitter for iPhone”, which was quickly removed but screenshots of the blunder circulated across social media.
One user taunting on the microblogging website Weibo that said, “The traitor has revealed himself,” got over 600 likes.
According to a report by Reuters, an internal Huawei memo dated 3rd January, the corporate senior vice-president and director of the board Chen Lifang said, “the incident caused damage to the Huawei brand”.
Huawei said in a memo that the mistake occurred when an outsourced social media handler Sapient experienced “VPN problems” in his desktop, wherein he used an iPhone with a roaming SIM card to send the message on time in the midnight.
With many services like Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc, Twitter too is blocked in China, as the Internet is heavily censored and to gain access, users are required to use virtual private network (VPN) connection.
The Chinese company in a memo said the blunder showed management oversight and procedural in compliance and Huawei went on to demote two of its employees, responsible by one rank and reduced the employees monthly salary by 5,000 yuan ($728.27). Also, the pay rank of one of the employees 'Huawei’s digital marketing director' will also be frozen for 12 months.
This is not the first time that an Apple product has given the brand and embarrassment, as Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of nationalistic tabloid Global Times was taunted last year after he used his iPhone to express support for Huawei and ZTE Corp.
(With Reuters input)
