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- Bud Light parent company Anheuser-Busch’s website went offline Wednesday
The main website of Bud Light parent company Anheuser-Busch has gone offline for unknown reasons, after the beer brand drew controversy by partnering with a transgender influencer for its latest campaign
‘The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred,’ read a message on the website, Anheuser-Busch.com, on Wednesday afternoon.
The outage appeared to affect only the Anheuser-Busch site, while websites for the company’s brands such as Bud Light and Busch Light remained functional.
The website for AB InBev, the Belgian multinational conglomerate that owns St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch, was also functioning normally. AB InBev did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Emails to Anheuser-Busch requesting comment were not immediately returned, and the company’s phone message system directed inquiries to the non-functioning website.
It was not immediately clear whether the site outage was due to routine technical issues, or could possibly be the result of a malicious attack.
However, the outage persisted for at least an hour. One security researcher,
The outage came several days after Bud Light’s partnership with trans content creator Dylan Mulvaney drew high-profile backlash.
Singer Kid Rock responded with a video of himself shooting up cases of the beer with an AR-15-style rifle, an alarming stunt that drew its own controversy.
In the video posted on Monday, the performer turned to the camera after shooting the beer, raised a middle finger and declared ‘F*** Bud Light and f*** Anheuser-Busch!’
Mulvaney, 26, announced the brand partnership in a series of videos posted to social media over the weekend to coincide with the Final Four games of the NCAA March Madness tournament.
The influencer was also honored with a commemorative beer can with her face printed on it, to celebrate the first anniversary of her popular TikTok video series documenting her gender transition.
Earlier on Thursday, a PR expert told DailyMail.com that the decision by Bud Light and their parent company Anheuser-Busch to link up with Mulvaney was a mistake.
Gareth Boyd, Marketing & PR Director at Forte Analytica, says that while he can understand where the decision came from it is ‘not the right way to go about it.’
Speaking to DailyMail.com he said: ‘I really cannot understand their approach for this because their core audience just cannot relate.
‘Cutting your core audience in the hope you can draw a completely new audience in, who haven’t been exposed before, doesn’t make sense.
‘Most US families are exposed to their father drinking the beer, or other family members, but it has never been seen as the cool beer.
‘In terms of what they did this year was good, with the Superbowl, but now they’ve come off the back of something really good and lit it on fire.
‘Kid Rock is the poster boy for Bud Light, and for someone like him to come out and shoot cans it tells you a lot about the reaction from their core base customers.
‘People pouring beer down their sink, it says quite a bit about how out of touch they have been with this campaign.’
Developing story, more to follow.
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