Engadget Bitten By Bogus iPhone Email

One of the things that I myself am starting to take very seriously is attempting to provide a stronger story. Thanks to my VoIP provider I can afford to hunt down leads and check facts (remember, this isn’t a paid gig) and work to avoid the “damn blogger” label. Well, where possible. A strong argument for trying to be sure to verify stories surfaced today when Engadget posted what was apparently an Apple internal email. To their defense they were bitten by an internal Apple email oops.

From Engadget:

Let us reiterate: this was an ACTUAL email distributed within Apple’s internal email system to Apple employees.

We received confirmation from Apple PR that this initial email sent out to Apple employees was incorrect, and they let us know that the iPhone and Leopard are both still on track, and should meet their expected launch timeframes.

The original email stated that the launch for the iPod and Leopard were going to be delayed again. This was in fact not the case. The real rub here was that this story NAILED the shares of Apple this afternoon wiping out $4 billion in market cap in a space of roughly 10 minutes. It did manage to bounce back in short order.

Now, while fact checking in this case would not have saved Engadget, it is a lesson to be sure of your sources (as much as possible). I just wonder who was responsible for the first email. Was their internal email system compromised? Was this a spoof?

See that? A thundering herd of lawyers just crested the hill.

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[tags]Apple Email, Apple Stock Crash, iPhone Email, Engadget Apple Email[/tags]

Posted by Dave Lewis on May 16, 2007. Filed under Email,Legal Aspects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry