By Pascal Oparada
Twitter’s new feature, which lets people know what device a client is tweeting from, has drawn its latest blood. This time, they are the staff of archrival to iPhone, China’s Huawei.
The embarrassing tweet has gained a lot of traction with over 600 shares on the Chinese social media, Weibo but was quickly deleted by the company.
“Thanks, @Huawei for making iPhone your device of choice. Even you guys don’t like your own interface,” one tweet read.
According to Reuters, 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 a memo.
The ‘culprits’ have since had their salaries slashed and another’s income frozen for a year.
The company’s memo explained that the blunder showed procedural in compliance and management oversight. It said it had demoted two employees responsible by one rank and reduced their monthly salaries by 5,000 yuan ($728.27).
The pay rank of one of the employees – Huawei’s digital marketing director – will also be frozen for 12 months, it said.
Huawei, which overtook Apple as the world’s second-largest smartphone vendor by volume in January-September, declined to comment on internal issues,
The company is currently battling with the US authorities over its Chief Finance Officer and the daughter of its founder, Meng Wanzhou, who is currently on bail in Canada awaiting extradition to the US over deals with Iran.