Burger King pokes fun at Google for outage

Burger King poked fun at Google yesterday after its services, including YouTube, Gmail, and Google Drive experienced a global outage. In a tweet, Burger King said: "Hey Google - have you tried turning it off and on again?" This famous line is from a British sitcom named The IT Crowd. While its tweet only had a mere 60 retweets, 13 quotes and 475 likes, several of the users on Twitter found it hilarious. One even told Burger King to "send [Google] some whoppers to inspire them to work properly". Meanwhile, one joked that Burger King is late as usual and another stayed true to British humour by saying: "Taking something old and reheating it...tut tut - you should know that is not nice by now."

https://twitter.com/BurgerKingUK/status/1338473513624199174

Burger King is known for teasing competitors. Last February, it made fun of McDonald's for losing the "Big Mac" trademark it filed for in the European Trademark Court. Burger King surprised consumers with a new menu called "Not Big Macs" for a limited period of time, containing product names that were inspired by feedback regarding McDonald's Big Mac. Some of these included, "Big Mac-ish but flame-grilled of course”, “Like a Big Mac but actually big”, “The burger Big Mac wished it was”, “Kind of like a Big Mac but juicier and tastier” and “Anything but a Bic Mac”. Meanwhile for this year's Halloween, it created the "Scary Places" experience which took users to abandoned restaurants where burgers have not been flame grilled for years and allows them to redeem a free Whopper coupon at the end of the "visit".

Google's services were down for nearly an hour yesterday, according to Reuters. YouTube tweeted that it is aware many users are experiencing issues accessing YouTube and that its team is looking into it. About an hour later, it tweeted that the platform is back up and running. While outage on select Google apps are not new, Reuters said that the recent outage affected popular services including Google Hangouts, Google Chats and Google Meet.

Last June, Google Cloud suffered a major outage which affected its own services and third-party apps including Snapchat and Discord. Google explained that the outage lasted for about three to four hours and impacted multiple US regions. Meanwhile in 2018, YouTube also experienced an outage affecting users in Southeast Asia, Japan, certain parts of Australia, the US, Brazil and Western Europe, CNBC reported.

Separately, Burger King is also allowing restaurant owners to advertise on its Instagram account in the UK and France. Knowing that 2020 has been a difficult year for the restaurant industry as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, Burger King wanted to continue showing solidarity with the sector and will stop posting pictures of its burgers. Instead, it will use this social media campaign to highlight several restaurants and their menus, addresses and promotions for free on Burger King's Instagram pages. 

https://twitter.com/BurgerKingUK/status/1338583450878668801

To participate, restaurant owners will have to post a picture of their signature dish with the hashtag #WhopperAndFriends and Burger King UK and France will repost them. The Instagram campaign will run until 21 January 2021.

Last month, Burger King also showed support for the food service industry in France and the UK by encouraging consumers to order from KFC, Domino's Pizza, Subway, Sushi Shop, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and Five Guys. This came after both countries went into lockdown again as a result of the rise in COVID-19 cases. Burger King said: "If you want to help, keep treating yourself to tasty through home delivery, takeaway or drive through. Getting a Whopper is always best, but ordering a Big Mac is also not such a bad thing."

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