Burger King has issued a public apology after suspending its Twitter account which was hacked by miscreants who posted obscene messages and changed its profile picture to a McDonald’s logo. The hacker collective ‘Anonymous’ is rumored to have claimed responsibility for the Burger King hack, which sent the fast food chain into a pandemonium. The Twitter message posted by the hacker explained that Burger King’s Twitter account had been sold to McDonald’s because the Whopper “flopped.”

The obscene Burger King tweets stopped a little over an hour spreading panic and confusion among customers. The fast food chain, which was recently embroiled in the horse meat scandal along with Tesco and Aldi, issued a public apology stating, “We apologize to our fans and followers who have been receiving erroneous tweets about other members of our industry and additional inappropriate topics.”

The fast food chain worked closely with Twitter to get the account shut down. By the time everything was deactivated, Burger King’s followers had been subjected to a number of offensive tweets. One post included a picture of a someone shooting up with a syringe. The message accompanying the image read: “We caught one of our employees in the bathroom doing this.” in roughly 30 minutes, Burger King had garnered around 5,000 new followers, which scaled up to reach 30,000 figure. Over the next hour and a quarter, rapid tweets were posted on the account including some that contained racial epithets, references to drug use and obscenities. One tweet on the Burger King Twitter account read: “if I catch you at a wendys, we’re fightin!”

In order to avoid any eventual blame, McDonalds rushed to issue a tweet on its official Twitter page, “We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts. Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking.” After the Twitter account reactivation, Burger King tweeted: “Interesting day here at BURGER KING®, but we’re back! Welcome to our new followers. Hope you all stick around!”.