McDonald’s Accidentally Tweeted An Unfinished Tweet, & The Entire Internet Is Roasting Them

When you return to work the day after a holiday your brain is likely still in a food/family/friends/wine-fizz coma, which can make for some hilarious mistakes. Kind of like when McDonald's accidentally tweeted an unfinished tweet about Black Friday that everyone on Twitter is roasting. The half-baked tweet posted by McDonald's the day after Thanksgiving reads, "Black Friday **** Need copy and link****." Anyone who's ever worked in media knows how easy it is for a little whoopsie to slip through the cracks when everyone is operating at half their normal brain power — if that is indeed what happened.

When it's an online oops, it can usually be deleted before anyone sees it, except on Twitter where people jump on things ASAP, which in this case may have been McDonald's brilliant strategy all along to make their Black Friday tweet go viral — unlike what happened to me at a former job. (At the first newspaper I worked at, I wrote a story about how then-Presidential Candidate John Edwards was developing a program to alleviate poverty. The newspaper template used the words "blah, blah, blah" as headline place holders, and those words didn't get changed to the correct headline before the paper went to print. Whoops.) The McDonald's tweet is proof that everyone makes mistakes, or that some people are secret marketing geniuses in the tradition of Don Draper.

No one is sure if this is a real oops or a strategic move, and McDonald's has neither confirmed nor denied Twitter users' claims that the move was intentional. However, Twitter user @McD_Truth, who is a self-described McDonald's vigilante offered this insight, "I believe it was intentional. A pun of: they aren’t working today but out shopping. It was genius. There wasn’t a planned Black Friday offer...especially coming from the Global $MCD handle."

@McD_Truth added that a real Black Friday offer would have come from the app or the U.S. Twitter handle versus the corporate account. But, even if it is a true Twitter boo boo, the burger bosses are still poking fun at themselves because admitting that they're not perfect also makes them super relatable, which might just be what McDonald's was planning the entire time.

Either way, the tweet and McDonald's good-natured clap back at itself is pretty savvy, because the post-holiday work struggle is real AF. Seriously, where's my coffee?

At least it didn't include Latin placeholder text, which is pretty common for people who don't use the "blah, blah, blah" stand-in text my newspaper used.

If this was a misstep, the social media manager reading the McDonald's tweet might have had a moment of OMG, but it surely didn't last long because the gaffe was pretty funny, not to mention pure genius.

And, the errant Tweet had people speculating how McDonald's would respond to this seeming major media crisis.

The "mistake" has people debating McDonald's Black Friday content more than they would had the fast-food chain posted the correct tweet, which is evidenced by the thousands of comments and dozens of articles like this one popping up about its epic mishap. At the end of the day, this social media manager surely deserves a promotion.

And, the smart AF tweet is soon to be seen in a framed picture in every McDonald's in the world.

Other people who deem the error real are shifting blame to the Hamburglar and Grimace who are rumored to have taken over the McDonald's Twitter account on Black Friday...

Because, Black Friday is clearly the social media manager's day off.

And, someone wants to get them in trouble.

But, it's more likely that the McDonald's social media team is a group of marketing magicians headed up by someone like Mad Men's whip smart copy chief Peggy Olson. I mean, seriously, everyone will remember this just like everyone remembers the words and slogans from every single McDonald's jingle ever made.

The oops tweet did not have the marks of an error like this — accidentally adding instructions to slogans ...

Like on this wedding cake.

Because the first rule of working on a holiday while you're short staffed is to never run out of coffee.

Whether or not the tweet was a mistake or strategically planned, Wendy's wasted no time with its own McDonald's take down.

People thought the response from Wendy's was pretty cold, and they loved it.

Now I really want some coffee and French fries, which seems to have been McDonald's strategy all along. Damn evil geniuses!