United Airlines stock plunges after six year old article resurfaces about filing for bankruptcy

An article from December of 2002 managed to resurface on the internet after 6 years.  The article was about how United Airlines had filed for bankruptcy.  The Chicago Tribune, Google News, and Bloomberg inadvertently helped to spread the article which led readers to believe the news as it was coming from a credible source.  As a result United Airlines stock plunged almost 80 per cent before trading of the stock was halted.

The Chicago Tribune commented that “The December 10, 2002, story contains information that would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002.  In addition, the comments posted along with the story are dated 2002. It appears that no one who passed this story along actually bothered to read the story itself.”

Josh Cohen who is the product manager for Google Business said that “We removed this story from the Google News index as soon as we were notified that it had been linked to in error.  It has been widely reported that many readers were unable to determine the original date of publication of this article, and our crawling was similarly unable to recognise that the article was old.”

An equity analyst for S&P, Jim Corridore, noted that “A part of the reason why investors reacted so dramatically is because the airlines are on shaky financial footing.”  Corridore added that the stock plunge would have happened to any airline in this situation.

www.united.com