iPhone Tweet Means Demotion for Workers at Rival

Falling solidly under the "you had one job" umbrella this week is a story out of China. If you're responsible for updating Huawei Technologies' social media pages, highlighting a rival tech company probably isn't the best idea—which is exactly what two Huawei employees just discovered. Reuters reports that Huawei sent out a now-deleted New Year's tweet wishing followers a "Happy #2019," which would have been fine except for the geolocation info included along with the post, which read "via Twitter for iPhone" (9to5Mac has a pic of the tweet). The iPhone is a competitor of Huawei's P series handsets, and Huawei has been trying to coax techies toward its device instead of Apple's, the BBC notes.

Because China blocks Twitter, many companies have to use VPN connections to log on, and that's where this problem seemed to originate: An outside vendor in charge of sending out tweets for Huawei was apparently having "VPN problems," per an internal Huawei memo, and so someone instead sent out the celebratory tweet via an iPhone so it could be done right around midnight on New Year's Eve. Two employees, including Huawei's digital marketing director, have been demoted and seen their pay slashed by about $725 a month. (Apple stocks had a brutal week, and the company is placing much of the blame on China's sluggish economy.)