Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B

cmd writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today's news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United's total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story." The article makes clear that Google's news bot only noticed the old story because it has been voted up in popularity on the site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. The original thought was that stock manipulation may have been behind the incident, but this suspicion seems to be fading.

Comments

Re:Holy crap.

[moderatorrater]

Not at all. Not even a little bit. Shut your fucking mouth.

This was a coincidence. This was a situation where one news aggregator picked something up and it perpetuated and snowballed through other aggregators. It was then thrown to normal people who took their actions. At no point did anyone do anything malicious, at no point was there a lie, and at no point was something so wrong that it should be regulated/made criminal.

We're in an economic downturn, there was some hysteria over a bogus news story, something happened that shouldn't have. This isn't a sign that there needs to be controls or something done "to try to prevent it happening again", at least not outside the organizations that made the mistakes. The aggregators will fix what they did wrong and it won't happen again in the future.

Re:BEHOLD....

[Surt]

It's an easy way to get free karma.

That said, I assume the original poster could not have made such a misattribution mistake undeliberately, particularly when penning a post about how a minor misattribution mistake caused a financial disaster.