Instead of sending a subscription email to 300 of their customers, New York Times sent it to around 8 million people, initially rushing to deny that the messages are genuine.
On Wednesday morning a lot of people woke up to see an email from the Times asking them to reconsider their decision to cancel their home delivery subscription. The email also included a toll-free number and a discount rate, reports
GigaOM.
The whole thing became even more suspicious after a lot of people that didn’t even have a home subscription began reporting the same message. It practically yelled “malicious hacker plot” and the newspaper quickly came to deny that the messages were sent by them.
“If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It's not from us,” could be read just a few hours ago on New York Times’ official Twitter page.
“It appears to be spam,” Robert H. Christie, NYT’s
PR guy told readers. “We are investigating emails.”
Initial clues showed that the email might have come from Epsilon Data Management, a division of Alliance Data Systems that handles email marketing campaigns. The first idea that popped into everyone’s head was that Epsilon may have been contracted by New York Times and as a result of a hacking operation a mailing list might have ended up in the wrong hands.
New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy later clarified the issue, admitting that the entire incident is a result of an error “on the part of the New York Times.”
“An email was sent earlier today from The New York Times in error. This email should have been sent to a very small number of subscribers, but instead was sent to a vast distribution list made up of people who had previously provided their email address to the New York Times. We regret the error.”
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