What Prompted This Airline To Tweet A Totally Explicit Image To A Complaining Customer?
US Airways may have single-handedly redefined the word "blunder" after posting a photo of a model plane being inserted in a woman's vagina on the company's official Twitter account.
By Sadho Ram — 16 Apr 2014, 10:35 AM — Updated over 10 years ago
It all started during this pretty routine conversation with a customer:
Screenshot of the conversation between a US Airways customer and US Airways
Image via SAYS via twitterAnd then on Monday, US Airways tweeted this…
US Airways said in the tweet, "We welcome feedback, Elle. If your travel is complete, you can detail here for review and follow up."
The tweet was pulled down about an hour later, but by then it has already made its rounds on the Internet
The airline sent out a follow-up tweet after the original NSFW image garnered more than hundreds of retweets
US Airways has tried to clear up some of the confusion around how the image was posted. It said in a statement that it was trying to flag the image as inappropriate but instead mistakenly included it in a message.
According to a spokesperson for the company, US Airways was attempting to flag an inappropriate tweet that contained the graphic image. In doing so, the pic.twitter.com URL was copied, as well. Then the graphic image was inadvertently pasted into a tweet sent to another user.
The image, which featured a naked woman and a toy plane, had originally been sent to the company's Twitter account by another user, US Airways said
It was then attached to a tweet that was sent to a US Airways customer who had taken to the social network to express her frustration that her flight was delayed. Once the mistake had been realised US Airways deleted the offending tweet and issued an apology.
nydailynews.com"It was an honest mistake. It was in an attempt to flag the tweet as inappropriate," said spokesman Matt Miller after the photo was allegedly first posted on their wall by an undisclosed Twitter user. "We captured it, flagged it as inappropriate," he said. When the airline then went to reply to customers, however, "unfortunately, the image was inadvertently included," said Miller.
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"First and foremost, we apologize," said Miller again on Tuesday. "We are in the midst of reviewing our processes but for the most part we have an understanding of what happened and how to ensure how it won't happen in the future," he said.
nydailynews.comMeanwhile, the US Airways employee who sparked the Twitter frenzy will keep his job
In a departure from the recent history of brand screw-ups on Twitter, US Airways has decided to go easy on the employee who tweeted a pornographic photo on the corporate account yesterday.
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"The individual who was involved will not be reprimanded or anything of the sort," said Matt Miller, a spokesman for American Airlines (which merged with US Airways), echoing remarks reported earlier by the New York Daily News. "It was an honest mistake."
nydailynews.comThe employee in question was a member of US Airways' in-house social media team. The company is going to review its social media processes to see how they can prevent something like this from happening again.
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