American Apparel Posted a Photo of the Challenger Explosion…Because They Thought it Showed Fireworks

This might be one of the worst social media mistakes any company has made...and that's really saying something.

American Apparel was posting photos of fireworks for the Fourth of July weekend on their Tumblr page on Thursday. If you don't know Tumblr, it's like Twitter but more oriented around posting photos and animated gifs.

And one of the photos they posted was...the explosion of the Challenger SPACE SHUTTLE.

You can't see the shuttle in the photo... it's the smoke trail we all saw when the Challenger was exploding in front of us. So it's a pretty iconic photo. They even used the hashtags "#smoke" and "#clouds."

People called them on it right away, so they pulled the photo and apologized. They blamed it on, quote, "an error by one of our international social media employees who was born after the tragedy."

(Mashable)

Here's a screenshot of American Apparel's post: