Twitter has a field day with Microsoft's tablet outage fiasco

January 28 2016

By @G_Parsons33

Published in Crisis

Microsoft’s partnership with the NFL (National Football League) has been a pretty rough road so far, and Sunday’s AFC championship game between the New England Patriots and Denver Broncos didn’t help. The Patriots were using Microsoft Surface tablets to monitor the match…only to have them stop working at a crucial moment in the game.

It turned out that the glitch wasn’t actually Microsoft’s fault, but that didn’t stop Twitter from having a field day. We used the Visibrain Twitter monitoring platform to analyze the 21,942 tweets that were posted during and after the game, to find out how Microsoft handled the crisis.

A moment’s glitch that turned into hours of ridicule on Twitter

The troubles began when the Patriots started experiencing issues with the tablets at a vital moment in the game. Of course, spectators noticed immediately, and unfortunately for Microsoft the problem was even announced by one of the commentators, drawing even more attention to it.

Twitter exploded: 21,942 tweets were posted about the outage between the evening of January 24th and January 26th.

An overview of Twitter volumes for Microsoft's Surface tablet crisis

We can see from the volume timeline that there was a huge burst in the number of tweets referring to Microsoft tablets between 9 pm and 10 pm (GMT): 13,122 tweets were posted during this first hour alone. By sorting tweets by date and time of publication, we can see that the first tweets about the outage were posted at 9.02 pm:

The first tweets that were posted about the Microsoft tablet's malfunction

Making a mockery of brands is what Twitter does best, so once word of the glitch got out, it didn’t take long for the jibes to start pouring in:

To add insult to injury, a lot of people were tweeting about Apple. As well as comparing the surface to the iPad, users were referring to the fact that earlier on in their partnership with NFL, commentators often referred to the tablets being used as “iPads”, a misrepresentation that Microsoft has been struggling to rectify:

There were 1,811 tweets posted using the keywords “apple” “ipad” or mentioning the @AppleOfficial Twitter handle, the most retweeted of which was the tongue-in-cheek post from @jemelehill we can see below:

The top tweets about the Microsoft Surface tablet outage that mentioned Apple

As if that wasn’t enough, barely 20 minutes after the start of the crisis a spoof account called Microsoft Tablet Rep @TabletRep tweeted for the first time:

A technical hiccup witnessed by millions

NFL games attract massive audiences, so for Microsoft, the sponsorship deal was an opportunity to get the Surface tablets seen by millions of people. Unfortunately, it also meant that the issues they experienced didn’t go unnoticed. In the first 24 hours after the crisis broke on Twitter, there had been 100,409,739 potential views(number based on the combined audiences of all those who tweeted about the incident).

As well as being picked up by mainstream press such as Mashable, the incident was covered by some very influential sports reporters and bloggers. If we filter on users tweeting about Microsoft whose Twitter bios contain the words “reporter”, “journalist” or “blogger”, we can see that the top users had very high audiences:

The influential sports reporters and bloggers that tweeted about the Surface tablet outage

A dedicated hashtag appeared just minutes after the start of the crisis: #TabletGate. Fortunately for Microsoft, the hashtag didn’t really take off: it was used just 260 times over the first four hours of the crisis before petering out completely:

A tweet volume timeline for the #tabletgate hashtag, which never really took off.

Tweet volumes wind down as the truth about the glitch is released

Less than two hours after the crisis kicked off, Microsoft issued a statement declaring that the outage was due to problems with the network, not the tablets themselves.

The news was relayed by media accounts, but was nowhere near as retweeted as the original story; the most popular tweet, posted by The Verge @verge, was only retweeted 99 times:

The most retweeted posts that passed on the truth about the outage not being Microsoft's fault

Surprisingly, Microsoft did not tweet about the issue at all, seeming to rely exclusively on the press to relay the information. An NFL spokesperson, Brian McCarthy @NFLprguy, also tweeted a message to clarify the situation on January 25th, but it got very few retweets.

Some Twitter users also piped up to defend the brand:

Their messages of support were mostly drowned out by the negative backlash however.

News moves fast on Twitter, whether it’s true or not. The opportunity to poke fun at a big brand like Microsoft was simply too tempting for most.

The technical difficulties experienced by Microsoft may not have been their fault, but what mattered was the audience’s perception of the brand at the time. By the time the truth about the network issues was revealed, the damage was already done. Communicating about the issue on Twitter might have helped to repair some of the damage, but Microsoft’s reputation has certainly taken a hit from the incident.

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Published in Crisis