This Photo Is Going Viral — Here's Why it Sparked a Twitter Storm in Russia

Impact

Image Credit: Steve Rosenberg via Twitter

BBC journalist Steve Rosenberg tweeted this photo from Sochi on Monday morning, and it has since blown up. And before you ask, yes, those are two toilets positioned very close together in a men's bathroom in one of the new buildings built for the upcoming Winter Olympics.

Since Rosenberg's tweet, shit — if you will — has hit the fan.

Not only does this mean that bathroom privacy may be hard to come by in Sochi, but for some Russians, this picture is evidence of colossal government waste.

Set to be the most expensive Olympics ever, the Sochi games are estimated to have cost roughly $50 billion. After previous reports of exorbitant wasteful spending — how about an $8.7 billion road? — critics of the government's spending jumped all over these toilets.

Everyone from Vladimir Putin's political rival Alexey Navalny to chess legend Gary Kasparov got in on the fun. 

The Sochi games have had a rough road to Feb. 7 with security concerns, political protests and wasteful spending all coming into play. Two toilets might be the least of Russia's worries when it comes to hosting the Olympics, but for a day there was one tweet that said it all.