You can’t believe everything you read on Twitter, even if it’s on the official account of a company like say, Burger King. Proving that anything on the Internet can be futzed with, someone took over Burger King’s Twitter account yesterday and announced that the chain had been sold to McDonald’s because “the Whopper flopped.” 

After a series of tweets under the @BurgerKing handle smattered over an hour, some containing obscenities and racial epithets, the company had Twitter suspend its account. The page’s account photo was also switched to the Mickey D’s logo with a background image of Fish McBites, reports the Associated Press (and a lot of confused Burger King followers).

Around noon yesterday a tweet went out on Burger King’s account saying: “We just got sold to McDonald’s!” Other tweets mentioning drugs and naughty words followed, along with things like “if I catch you at a wendys, we’re fightin!”

The page’s profile info was also changed to read: BURGER KING USA official Twitter account. Just got sold to McDonalds because the whopper flopped =[ FREDOM IS FAILURE. mcdonalds.com. In a hood near you” with a link to a presumably fake news link.

McDonald’s responded to the controversy by assuring its followers that its hands were clean:

Eventually Burger King wrested control from whoever had tapped into its account and was back to tweeting last night with:

The company says it doesn’t know who was responsible for the hack, said a company spokesman, who issued an apology yesterday.

“Earlier today, our official BK Twitter Account was compromised by unauthorized users,” the spokesman said in a statement. “Upon learning of this incident, our social media teams immediately began working with Twitter security administrators to suspend the compromised account until we could re-establish our brand’s official Twitter page. We apologize to our loyal fans and followers, whom might have received unauthorized tweets from our account. We are pleased to announce that the account is now active again.”

Burger King Twitter account back up after Monday afternoon hacking; company apologizes [Associated Press]

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