hacked

Wow, weak. Apparently Chipotle's official Twitter account being "hacked" on July 21st was just a publicity stunt tied into their 20th anniversary marketing campaign.

So basically, some loser in marketing making seven figures a year decided it would be a good idea to fake a felony to drum up attention to their social media presence. Chipotle representative Chris Arnold had this to say about the incident:

"Chipotle appeared to be the latest brand to have its Twitter account hacked on Sunday when its main account, @ChipotleTweets, posted a series of confusing and seemingly random tweets over the course of an hour. Now, the company has come forward and admitted that it faked having its account hacked as part of a publicity stunt tied to its 20th anniversary promotional campaign. 'We thought that people would pay attention, that it would cut through people's attention and make them talk, and it did that.'" [via Mashable]

The fake tweets were retweeted 12,000 times, and the Twitter account ended up getting 4,000 new subscribers that day compared to their usual daily subscription rate of about 250.

I think we all know how Chipotle can atone for this, though. Cough free guacamole cough.

As evidenced by the tweet at the end there, Crayola has since apologized for the off-color content. What shade of red do you think their social media team is right about now?

Facebook and Instagram were down for a brief period of time on Monday, and this was enough to send some people into a panic.

The local 911 dispatcher in the East Bay area of California told the Claycord blog that they received 5 different calls from people complaining about the outage.

“Our lines are [sic] dedicated to handle life and death calls, and even though Facebook is important to a lot of people, it’s not a matter of life and death when it stops working,” the dispatcher said. “One caller even called back to tell me I was being rude because I told her it wasn’t a life threatening emergency.”

The hacker group Lizard Squad initially claimed responsibility for the outage, but Facebook later issued a statement denying the group’s involvement.

“Earlier today many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram,” they said. “This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems. We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone.”

Fortunately it only lasted an hour, so these 5 terrible people were able to quickly get back to posting selfies, babies and gross food pictures. PHEW.