NY Times Mistakenly Sends Email to 9M People

Nearly 9 million people got a puzzling email from the New York Times today, but fears of a massive hack are apparently unfounded. Turns out, it was good old-fashioned human error. The newspaper meant to send the email only to a few hundred people who had recently canceled home delivery, but it instead went out to anyone who had ever provided an email address to the paper.

The Times initially called the errant email "spam," setting off fears on Twitter and elsewhere that recipients' security had been breached, notes Jim Romenesko's blog. “We regret that the error was made, but no one’s security has been compromised,” says a spokeswoman. The paper's email service provider, Epsilon, got hacked earlier this year, leading many to speculate early in the day that today's email was some kind of phishing scheme. More at Daily Intel. (More New York Times stories.)