Mexican restaurant chain Chipotle on Sunday apologized its customers, especially those who follow it on Twitter, after its official account on the micro-blogging site was hacked by some unidentified hackers.
“Our Twitter account was hijacked overnight for about two hours during which a series of offensive tweets was posted to the account,” Chris Arnold, Chipotle’s communications director, said.
The cyber attack at Chipotle’s official Twitter account led to the posting of some insensitive and racially offensive tweets in the followers’ Twitter feeds early on Sunday.
“We apologise for the nature of the posts that were made during that time, and we are now conducting an investigation to try to determine what happened and who might have been involved,” Arnold added.
Early on Sunday in the United States, @ChipotleTweets account’s profile picture was changed from a pepper to a swastika.
Chipotle may be having a twitter problem… pic.twitter.com/lbXYrnlGLf — danielkennedy74 (@danielkennedy74) February 8, 2015
In the hack, one of the tweets also attacked American President Barack Obama.
Another tweet said that the fast-casual food chain will be shutting down all of its restaurants at the end of this year as the food supply of the company had been poisoned by someone having the Twitter account of @TheCeltic666.
Meanwhile, Twitter appeared to have suspended the two accounts under the ids @TUGFeds and @TheCeltic666 on Sunday morning as a precautionary measure.
The apology tweet from Chipotle appeared after about three hours.
According to some reports, the food chain’s website was also attacked earlier and its traffic was temporarily hijacked to another Web page.
The company has 630,000 followers on Twitter.
Notably, the food chain has faked about a cyber attack of its Twitter account two years ago as part of its 20th anniversary campaign.