Burger King Twitter account goes offline after apparent hacking

Burger King hasn't really been sold to McDonald's, despite what it says on Burger King's Twitter feed today.

Someone apparently hacked the account, posting obscene messages and changing the profile picture to a McDonald's logo.

The tweets stopped after a little more than an hour. Burger King says it reached out to Twitter to suspend the account and to get it back up and running again.

Burger King usually tweets several times a week. Today, just after noon, Eastern time, someone tweeted on the account, "We just got sold to McDonalds!" Dozens of other tweets and retweets followed, including some that contained racial epithets, references to drug use and obscenities.

A spokesman for Burger King says the restaurant chain doesn't know who hacked the account. The company says no other social media accounts were affected.

At the beginning of this month, Twitter acknowledged that cyber attackers may have stolen user names and passwords of 250,000 users.

Cox Media Group