So, this happened.
ABC (“Yokohama mistakenly tweets N Korean missile launch“):
Officials in the Japanese city of Yokohama have been left red-faced after mistakenly announcing the launch of a North Korean missile to 40,000 followers on Twitter.
The city, south of Tokyo, prematurely fired its tweet just before noon (local time), announcing “North Korea has launched a missile” with blank spaces to indicate the exact time.
“We received a call from one of our followers who had noticed the mistake,” a city official said.
“We had the Tweet ready and waiting, but for an unknown reason it was dispatched erroneously.”
The city retracted the tweet about 20 minutes later and apologised to followers of @yokohama_saigai, the official said.
There have been numerous instances over the years of media outlets prematurely posting obituaries of people while they’re still alive. It’s a standard industry practice to have canned obits for very famous people who are old or sick and, well, mistakes happen.
But how much time, really can pre-loading a 140-character tweet save?
