Huawei Technologies punishes employees for using iPhone to Tweet

An internal memo revealed that Huawei Technologies in China punishes two of its employees for posting New Year greetings that was sent on the smartphone maker’s official Twitter account using an iPhone. This is one of the incidences in recent times which has come to light after the company has started punishing or boycotting its employees for use of an iPhone.

On New Year’s Day, a wish was sent on the official Twitter handle of the company that said, “Happy #2019” which marked sent via Twitter for iPhone. The Tweet was soon removed, but the screen shot of the message soon made its way on the social media. The P Series handsets of Huawei compete with Apple’s iPhones in the market. One of the users of the microblog Weibo quipped, “The traitor has revealed himself”. The comment was liked more than 600 times. The incident had led to an issue of an internal memo dated January 3, 2019 and was seen by the leading daily Reuters.

Chen Lifang, the corporate senior vice-president and director of the board said, “the incident caused damage to the Huawei brand.” The memo mentioned that the mistake had occurred when the outsourced social media handler Sapient had experienced VPN problems with a desktop computer, due to which it used an iPhone with a roaming SIM card to send a message on time at midnight.

Like many other services including Facebook and Alphabet, Twitter is also blocked in China, where the internet is heavily censored. In order to gain access, the users need to virtual private network connection. Huawei had left behind Apple as the world’s second largest smartphone vendor in terms of volume in January-September but had declined to comment on the internal issues when it was contacted by Reuters. Meanwhile, Sapient did not immediately respond to a request by a contact through form on its website. Even the calls to its Beijing officer were not answered.

Photo Credits: The straits btimes