US restaurant chain Chipotle admits faking Twitter account hack

'We thought that people would pay attention, that it would cut through people's attention and make them talk'

A US restaurant chain called Chipotle has admitted that an apparent hack of its Twitter account was instead a publicity stunt.

Over the course of an hour on Sunday, its account, @ChipotleTweets, posted a series of bizarre and random tweets indicative of a cracked account.

However, the company has now admitted that it was part of campaign to promote the Mexican restaurant chain's 20th anniversary - and to drum up some free publicity on the back of an apparent hack.

Talking to the tech website Mashable, Chipotle "representative" Chris Arnold said: "We thought that people would pay attention, that it would cut through people's attention and make them talk, and it did that."

He admitted, too, that it was part of a wider public relations strategy, and not something hatched and executed by an intern. "It was definitely thought out: we didn't want it to be harmful or hateful or controversial," said Arnold.

"We thought that it really fit well within the context of our 20th anniversary promotion where we were putting clues in all sorts of things," Arnold continued.

"We had clues pop up in a lot of places and thought that incorporating something into our social media presence would fit well into that promotion."

However, the company nevertheless said that it had added more than 4,000 followers as a result of the publicity around the "hack", compared to about 250 per day.

It achieved a total of about 12,000 retweets of the offending tweets - compared to about 75 per day, according to Mashable.