It all started during this pretty routine conversation with a customer:
And then on Monday, US Airways tweeted this...
The tweet was pulled down about an hour later, but it didn't stop it from spreading through Twitter very, very fast.
They did acknowledge the tweet and apologized.
• The photo was actually tweeted at the airline earlier today.
• The photo was also trending on Reddit's very NSFW shock imageboard Spacedicks last week.
• The graphic picture is originally from a German-language amateur porn and shock site.
UPDATE: US Airways has cleared up some of the confusion around how the image was posted.
According to a spokesperson for the company, US Airways was attempting to flag an inappropriate tweet that contained the graphic image. In doing so, the pic.twitter.com URL was copied, as well. Then the graphic image was inadvertently pasted into a tweet sent to another user. While the two tweets were live they actually linked to each other. The airline's spokesperson said they're very sorry for what happened and that it was an honest mistake.