Out of date story listed on Google causes havoc for airline

 

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Posted on 10 Sep 2008 at 18:04

A six-year-old news story re-listed by Google led to a sharp fall in the value of a US airline's shares. United Airlines' value fell by £567 million - a 75 per cent drop - due to out-of-date information supplied to the stock market.

The story about the airline declaring bankruptcy was originally published by the Chicago Tribune in 2002, but reproduced on Monday by the South Florida Sun Sentinel's website.

A stream of visits to the news article on the Sentinel website's pushed it into the site's 'most viewed' category. Google's automated news search process picked up the story in light of its sudden surge in popularity. As the story was written on the same day of the week that the multitude of visits took place, Google's technology understood the story as being a new article, and displayed it as a prominent current story.

It is thought that a group of online fraudsters may have targeted the article, and distributed a botnet of compromised machines, so that the story experienced a multitude of hits, accounting for its sudden rise in popularity.

News agency Income Securities Advisors supplied the information to Bloomberg as fresh news. Following Bloomberg's publishing of the article, the airline's share prices plummeted. Income Securities Advisors revealed that the blunder came about when one of its reporters searched for "bankruptcy 2008" in the 'News' section of Google's search engine.

"'The minute the story came up, the phone started ringing around here, and that's when I became aware of it, and I knew something wasn't right," said Richard Lehmann, CEO at Income Securities Advisors.

He asked Bloomberg to pull the article, who obliged and published a correction.

The Tribune Co. - which owns both the South Florida Sun Sentinel and the Chicago Tribune - insists the article was clearly in the newspaper's archive.

"The story contains information that would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002. In addition, the comments posted along with the story are dated 2002," the paper said in a statement.

The airline was understandably livid and warned it is seeking legal advice. The shares plummeted within minutes of the story going online, but recovered within a couple of hours.

Author: Theo Salvador