Huawei punishes staff after Happy New Year tweet sent from an iPhone
Huawei staff have reportedly been punished after Twitter followers were wished a happy new year from the official account via an iPhone.
The tweet was posted on New Year’s Day, wishing followers a "Happy #2019", but the message included automated text telling users it came “via Twitter for iPhone”.
While the company promptly deleted the tweet, screenshots of the message were shared thousands of times by Twitter users.
That was fast pic.twitter.com/y6k0FJF7Gq
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) January 1, 2019
The Chinese telecom giant is a rival smartphone producer to Apple, with its P-series devices going head to head with the iPhone.
According to an internal memo seen by Reuters, corporate senior vice-president and board director Chen Lifang said “the incident caused damage to the Huawei brand”.
As a result the company has reportedly demoted two staff by one rank and slashed their monthly salaries by 5,000 yuan (£575.48).
One of those two staff, the digital marketing director, will also have their pay rank frozen for 12 months, Reuters reported.
The issue arose when the firm in charge of handling Huawei’s social media, Sapient, suffered VPN issues on a computer – with Twitter blocked in China – and so sent the tweet from an iPhone to make sure it went out at midnight, the memo reportedly said.
Huawei declined to comment.