It’s always nice to wake up to a story which more or less confirms that our entire global reality is now propped up by a series of mindless algorithms which can wreak terrible havoc based on a single minor miscalculation. Really gets the heart pumping, folks!
The Dow Jones newswires, which are basically the lifeblood of the finance industry, pushed out a bunch of erroneous news stories this morning, including several headlines which claimed Google was acquiring Apple for $9 billion based on a stipulation in Steve Jobs‘ will.
Dow Jones claims that a “technical error” pushed these fake stories out, and while they’re clearly not true – $9 billion for Apple and its assets would be an unbelievable bargain – the armies of bots and algorithms which run the real-time high-speed trading market couldn’t really tell that. Apple’s stock price shot up to $158 in the two minutes the stories were up.
Props to Apple blog 9to5Mac for spotting the fake yarn. Here’s the pic they grabbed of the story as it appeared on the Dow Jones newswire.
Most real stories kick off with the all-time golden lede of “in a surprise move to everyone who is alive”. I would also consider it a dereliction of journalistic duty if the only quote they managed to get out of a source at Google was “yay”.
Dow Jones issued a statement on what happened:
Please disregard the headlines that ran on Dow Jones Newswires between 9:34 a.m. ET and 9:36 a.m. ET. Due to a technical error, the headlines were published. All of those headlines are being removed from the wires. We apologise for the error.
Can’t wait for the next time this happens, with something far less easily disproven.
