Malindo Air found itself in a bit of a fix earlier this morning when a number of customer queries via their official twitter account received somewhat rude remarks from the @Malindo_Air account. There were initial confusions as to whether this was indeed the official twitter account of the airline, the description on the account reads “Welcome to the not so Official Twitter Page of Malindo Air”. A quick check with the Malindo Air website however reveals this to be their official account.
Needless to say, that tweet went viral on twitter. A few more cynical remarks were tweeted from the account before at around 1130 am, a tweet was made using the same account, informing users that the account has been hacked. Oddly enough, at that point in time, none of the cynical replies were deleted from the account. At about 1.42 pm however, another interesting tweet was made offering 100,000 free seats till the end of the week, as a compensation of sorts for the events that transpired earlier in the morning.
This 100,000 free seats tweet was once again attributed to the generous ‘hacker’ who caused the problems earlier in the morning. What has left us, and many others on twitterverse perplexed over is if the account was indeed hijacked, then it would be safe to assume that the password would have been changed at some point in time. Alternatively, the account should have been shutdown until the issue was resolved. At time of writing, the twitter account still remains operational. There has been no mention of the incident on Malindo’s website, but there were a number of postings on their facebook page urging customers to disregard any postings on Twitter.
What this has done however is generate a lot of buzz on Malindo Air. The twitter account which was pretty dormant for the last one week has suddenly been getting a lot of attention. The hashtag #Malindogothacked, which was indecently posted from the @Malindo_Air account either by the hijacker or officials from Malindo Air themselves has been trending across all social media channels. The story has already made it on most local news sites. Hacked or not, this has generated a huge amount of free publicity for the new hybrid airline. As they say, any publicity is good publicity.
