China tech giant Huawei has punished two employees for posting New Year's greetings on the smartphone maker's official Twitter account using an iPhone device, an internal memo has revealed.
The tweet was however, quickly removed and replaced with another tweet by Huawei which then said "sent via Twitter Media Studio."
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Though Huawei was quick in replacing the tweet, twitter user Marques Brownlee was able to screenshot the tweet before it was taken down. Brownlee then shared with his 3 million Twitter followers the deleted tweet and the new one.
According to an Internal memo dated January 3, seen by Reuters, Huawei's corporate senior vice-president and director of the board Chen Lifang said "the incident caused damage to the Huawei brand".
Chen Lifang said the incident occurred when Sapient, an outsourced social media handler experienced "VPN problems" with a desktop computer and so had to use an iPhone with a Hong Kong SIM card to send the New Year message.
Huawei said in the memo that the blunder showed "procedural in compliance and management oversight, and thus demoted two of it's employees.
The document said one unnamed employee and Huawei's director of digital marketing apart from being demoted, their monthly salaries were slashed by 5,000 Yuan ($730). The digital marketing director in addition to the above, was hit with a salary freeze and no promotion for the next 12 months.
Foreign sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google etc are all blocked in the China. Anyone who wants to make post on any of those sites will have to make use of virtual private network (VPN) to circumvent the country's censorship.
Huawei last year toppled Apple from its position as the world'd second-biggest smartphone-seller, under global number one Samsung.
Both Huawei and Sapient did not reply to a request for a comment on the incident.