Huawei Punish two Staff for Tweeting from iPhone

Chinese phone giant Huawei has punished two employees for tweeting a New Year’s Day greeting from the company’s official Twitter account using an iPhone. 

As a result, two of the Chinese smartphone manufacturer’s employees were demoted one rank and received a monthly cut in pay of 5,000 yuan (approximately $728). One of the employees, Huawei’s digital marketing director, would also see their pay rank frozen for 12 months. 


The tweet from iPhone incident occurred when the Huawei’s outsourced social media agency, Sapient, experienced Virtual Private Network (VPN) problems with its desktop computer.In order to send the New Year’s message at midnight, an iPhone with a roaming SIM card was used to send the tweet. The incident, the company said exposed flaws in their processes and management. 

Huawei’s tweet publicly displayed “Twitter from iPhone” below the message was roundly mocked on social media. 

Huawei deleted its original New Year’s message and reposted it, this time with the source displaying “Twitter Media Studio.”

 The replies to the reposted tweet filled with users posting their screenshots of the “Twitter from iPhone” version.From Huawei’s standpoint, the incident was surely embarrassing, as Apple’s iPhone was a major competitor to Huawei’s line of smartphones. 

However, the response seems over the top, especially when you consider that it was devised as a workaround to deal with an unforeseen technical issue involving a outsourced company.