United Airlines lost more than 75% of its value yesterday, erasing $1.2 Billion. This was due to an error in Google’s automated news gathering process that mines the newspapers of the world for breaking news or interesting stories.

It turns out it picked up on a 6 year old story from the Florida Sun-Sentinel about UAL filing for bankruptcy, and in turn GOOG made the story available to Bloomberg financial news and from there the shit hit the fan on Wall Street. All the while no one actually read through the story to validate that it was new and relevant.

Sounds like a bug in the news aggregator and bunch of idiots pushing the ‘I Believe Button’ when they kept picking up on the news and circulating it as new news, trusting in GOOG’s ability. A lot of folks are at fault here and incidents like this are not excusable, especially by a service that is expected to have higher quality standards than this (referring to both Google and Bloomberg). I smell a lawsuit acoming in 3, 2, ….

Read the full story: "United’s share slide: A comedy of errors"

Related posts:

1. Google’s Gmail Service Crashes Across World
2. Google Bonus Is Smartphone, Not Cash
3. ‘Eco-Uproar’ After American Airlines Flies Just Five Passengers Chicago to London
4. Minnesota Town to Google: ‘Go To Hell’
5. Netflix: Good News & Bad News on Silverlight Adoption

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.