It all started during this pretty routine conversation with a customer:
@USAirways Unhappy that 1787 sat for an hour on tarmac in CLT because overweight, resulting in over hour late arrival in PDX...
@ellerafter We truly dislike delays too and are very sorry your flight was affected.
@USAirways yeah, you seem so very sorry. So sorry, in fact, that you couldn't be bothered to address my other tweets.
And then on Monday, US Airways tweeted this...
Click here if you really want to see what the picture was. We don't recommend it.
The tweet was pulled down about an hour later, but it didn't stop it from spreading through Twitter very, very fast.
WTF @USAirways
Lol at @USAirways i cant even rt it
I would HATE to be in PR for US Airways right now
Pulitzer in feature writing goes to the US Airways tweet
Some people are saying @USAirways was hacked but it looks like an inside job.
They did acknowledge the tweet and apologized.
We apologize for an inappropriate image recently shared as a link in one of our responses. We’ve removed the tweet and are investigating.
• The photo was actually tweeted at the airline earlier today.
• The photo was also trending on Reddit's very NSFW shock imageboard Spacedicks last week.
• The graphic picture is originally from a German-language amateur porn and shock site.
UPDATE: US Airways has cleared up some of the confusion around how the image was posted.
According to a spokesperson for the company, US Airways was attempting to flag an inappropriate tweet that contained the graphic image. In doing so, the pic.twitter.com URL was copied, as well. Then the graphic image was inadvertently pasted into a tweet sent to another user. While the two tweets were live they actually linked to each other. The airline's spokesperson said they're very sorry for what happened and that it was an honest mistake.