The major concern about Vodafone’s little Twitter incident made people worry as to whether the company’s account had been hacked.
With information theft on the rise, such concerns are natural and valid. Fortunately, the actual problem is a lot simpler and is not a major issue at all. Apparently, an employee of Vodafone had posted an offensive post on Twitter which promptly got re-tweeted before the original post had been deleted. The offending post apparently had discriminating remarks against the gay community and had sexist connotations towards women.
Vodafone employees had posted several other tweets to apologize and clarify the events. According to the posts, the operator already identified the offending employee and suspended the person indefinitely. The matter is being handled internally and it is probable that the employee would be terminated for the misconduct –which makes perfect sense.
The main assurance that Vodafone representatives gave was that “this is not a hack”, showing that security was the real issue in the event.
Despite this little problem, the rest of 2010 has been good to Vodafone. The company started the year by taking out the HTC HD2 and the XPERIA X2 from its 2010 lineup of mobile devices. It was later announced by Google that Vodafone will be a partner of the company in distributing the Nexus One in the UK.
The latter half of January saw the launch of the Apple iPhone –Vodafone UK sold 100,000 units in the first week alone. The number of subscribers is continuing to grow as iPhone subscribers from rival O2 are reportedly switching over to the Vodafone network. With the larger, faster and more stable 3G network offered by the company, it is easy to understand why.
Read the full article on the Tweet and Vodafone’s reaction to the event at Thinq UK.
