Find Out What Happened to the Person Responsible for Tweeting That Graphic US Airways Photo

A spokesman for the airline insists it was all an accident

By Jenna Mullins Apr 15, 2014 10:32 PMTags
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When US Airways accidentally tweeted an incredibly graphic and NSFW image while responding to customer complaints, everyone's initial reaction (after making every "landing strip" joke in the book) was this:

"Somebody's getting fired."

An obvious assumption, considering that pretty much every media outlet covered the story and roughly every human on earth saw the pornographic photo. (If you want to see it, you can find it easily on Twitter. But we're warning you: it's absolutely horrifying). Basically, it was a giant PR nightmare.

Well, US Airways has released statements and explanations about the graphic pic that will haunt people's dreams for the rest of time. As expected, the airline insists it was just an accident. But what surprised most people is the fact that the person responsible for unleashing that photo to the world was not fired.

"It was an honest mistake. It was in an attempt to flag the tweet as inappropriate," spokesman Matt Miller told the Daily News. "We captured it, flagged it as inappropriate."

When the person behind US Airways' twitter responded to a customer venting about the airline, they "inadvertently included" the explicit photo in the response.

Miller insists that the employee who made the mistake will not be fired.

"First and foremost, we apologize," he said. "We are in the midst of reviewing our processes but for the most part we have an understanding of what happened and how to ensure how it won't happen in the future,"

It sounds like a copy and paste job gone wrong. And if that's the case, we can certainly empathize. If some of the stuff we copy to our virtual clipboard made it out into the world…well, we shudder to think about it. Seriously, we send our friends weird stuff throughout the day.

The moral of this story is twofold. First, we found out that it is possible for an image to be so gross that it actually gets seared to the inside of our eyelids so it's the only thing we see when we close our eyes. And second, nothing brings out bad puns in greater droves than a sex-related scandal on Twitter.

And remember, kids: friends don't let friends copy and paste without supervision. 

What say you guys? Do you buy the "we were flagging it as inappropriate" explanation? And should the employee be fired, or was this all really just an honest mistake?

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