Tom Cruise helps bring down appliance store's website

Post by Jeff Stevens on 27th September 2012 in General industry

A domestic appliance retailer in the United States got more publicity than it bargained for yesterday, after writing a blog post about a visit by Tom Cruise.

Entitled Tom Cruise Buys a Fridge, an image apparently showing the Hollywood star standing with his nose up against a refrigerator became so popular on the internet that visitors to the store's website brought down the company server.

In fact, the photograph was a fake and had been published by New York-based Rochester Appliance as a joke.

The company employee later posted: "What?! I made this! There's another photo that preceded this one, here. They're definitely 'shopped [Photoshopped]. We just released our first ever ad for the business yesterday! EDIT: 7:30pm: Y'all killed our server. 2am, site is up again. Good grief. –RocAppliance"

According to a report by Examiner.com, the business has now added a further post to its site saying: "Stop calling us to see if it's real! It's fake/photoshopped. A cardboard cutout would have looked more realistic!"

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