McDonald’s blames unnamed ‘external source’ for now-deleted tweet from an official account that attacked ‘disgusting excuse of a president’

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

A McDonald’s company Twitter account went rogue on Thursday, tweeting President Trump to call him “a disgusting excuse of a president”.

A now-deleted tweet from the verified @McDonaldsCorp account said: “@RealDonaldTrump You are actually a disgusting excuse of a President and we would love to have @BarackObama back, also you have tiny hands.”

In a statement issued on Thursday evening, McDonald’s apologised for the tweet and blamed it on an unnamed “external source”.

“Based on our investigation, we have determined that our Twitter account was hacked by an external source. We took swift action to secure it, and we apologise this tweet was sent through our corporate McDonald’s account,” the statement read.

The tweet was sent at 9.16am EST (eastern standard time) and remained live for around 15 minutes. In this time, whoever was in control of the account pinned it to the top of @McDonaldsCorp’s Twitter page.

Nate Goldman (@NateGoldman) at first i thought this was your classic "employee mistakenly tweets from corporate account" scenario. then McDonalds pinned the tweet pic.twitter.com/B9qj9HzXnm

Twitter users rushed to air their theories about what happened: perhaps the account was hacked, an employee had mistakenly tweeted from the wrong account on Tweetdeck, or a disgruntled employee wanted to make their mark.

Others noted the tweet had been sent from Twitter web, while every other tweet on the McDonald’s account had been sent using a social media management platform:

Alex Hern (@alexhern) The McDonalds tweet, and its update, were sent from Twitter Web, while their normal tweets come from social media manager Sprinklr. pic.twitter.com/vxl5RGwjAS

The tweet was greeted with delight from many users of the site:

Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) Coffee date → all-day breakfast → uh oh pic.twitter.com/EyFQBB43af

Scott Renshaw (@scottrenshaw) Where were you when McDonalds became The Resistance?

And some Trump supporters began to tweet about instigating a boycott.

President Trump is known to be a McDonald’s fan. When he won the Republican party’s presidential nomination, he celebrated with a McDonald’s meal on his plane, as seen on his Instagram:

He has previously said he is partial to a “fish delight”, although by this he probably meant the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish. He is unlikely to be pleased by the tweet.