An article from 2002 detailing the bankruptcy filing of United Airlines resurfaced online Monday, sending the company’s stock plummeting as some traders thought the report was current news.
UAL, parent of United Airlines, saw its shares fall 76 percent to $3 because of an article by the Florida Sun-Sentinel reporting the bankruptcy filing which was picked up by Bloomberg financial news service.
“United continues to execute its previously announced business plan to successfully navigate through an environment marked by volatile fuel prices and continues to have strong liquidity,” the company said in a statement.
The Sun-Sentinel did not have an explanation as to how the article, first published on December 10, 2002 appeared on its site. The Tribune Co, which owns the Sun-Sentinel, said it was investigating the incident.
The Tribune Co said it was looking into any possible role that Google may have had in crawling the Sun-Sentinel site over the weekend and pushing the story onto the “popular Stories: Business” section of the paper.
Google says it had no role in the article resurfacing and that it first appeared on the Sun-Sentinel site. On the company blog Google states,”On Saturday, September 6th at 10:36PM Pacific, the Google crawler discovered a new link on the Florida Sun-Sentinel website in a section of the most viewed stories labeled ‘Popular Stories: Business.'”
“The link appeared in that section sometime after Googlebot’s last crawl at 10:17PM; because the crawler saw this new link appear, it followed it to an article titled “UAL Files for Bankruptcy.”
“We removed this story from the Google News index as soon as we were notified that it had been linked to in error.”
