Burger King has suspended its Twitter account after it was hacked a few hours ago. The prank saw the hackers promote rival McDonald's and claim Burger King had been sold to the chain because "the whopper flopped". Ironically its Twitter followers increased around a third as a result of the prank.
Under the attack, Burger King's Twitter
page - which had almost 90,000 followers - was transformed to a McDonald's page, complete with logo and background.
The hackers held Burger King's
account for an hour and sent out 55 malicious Tweets before it was
suspended by the company.
Consumers have lapped up the controversy on Twitter. Hundreds of users adopted the hashtags #SoldToMcDonalds and #FailureWhopper.
However, in an ironic twist, Burger King's follower numbers reportedly soared within the hour the hackers were active, going from 83,000 to 110,000.
McDonald's has moved to assure consumers it wasn't involved in the hacking, Tweeting: "We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts. Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking." The comment has been re-Tweeted over 7,000 times and favourited more than 2,500.
Locally, Hungry Jacks was not immediately able to answer questions from AdNews over the robustness of its social media security arrangements.
Nevertheless, Burger King will not be the first or last big brand to suffer at the hands of hackers or disgruntled employees. Earlier this month, controversy also embroiled UK music chain HMV.
The company - which is currently in administration - saw its employees take to its offical Twitter account to say they were being after axed after it announced it would cull 190 staff. One employee posted "Live from HR where we're all being fired!", while another claimed they had heard the marketing director asking "how to shut Twitter down". The tweets were sent with the hashtag #hmvXFactorFiring.
In the wake of the hacking, the under-fire company deleted the Tweets and urged fans still to shop with it.
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