The Fox News website bore all the markings of a hack earlier today, though the conservative-leaning US cable channel called the odd-sounding, outdated stories on its homepage an "accident."
"During routine website maintenance, a home page prototype was accidently moved to the actual site," said Fox News Chief Digital Officer Jeff Misenti in a statement sent to TechRadar.
"As with any mistake in testing, engineers noticed the error and quickly brought the site back to its normal function."
Breaking! But not
FoxNews.com briefly informed visitors of old, strange-sounding stories, including one about Apple's unveiling of new computers and "OS X Sea Lion," a joke made back at WWDC 2013.
The website also had a breaking news programming alert banner at the top that read "World Zombie Day to Bring Out the Living Dead." Believe it or not, that's celebrated every year in October.
The page's main story had the admittedly attention-grabbing headline, "WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE."
Fox News' official Twitter account called this an internal production error that had been remedied:
"As you may have seen, http://FoxNews.com is having issues. It's an internal production problem and will be fixed soon," tweeted Fox.
Hacking becomes hackneyed
Whatever went down at Fox, its website is back to normal and functioning properly once again.
Though it explained the problem as internal, a hack wouldn't have left it the first website to be breached by third-party intruders.
Big name companies like Ubisoft, Sony, Valve, Facebook and Twitter have all had their web services meddled with in one way or another.
Hackers are usually looking to swipe credit card numbers, data-rich user account information, or simply tweak a site's homepage.
Sometimes, as it appears to be the case today, somebody just hit the wrong button and a number of suspect-sounding stories surface to the top of the homepage on a major news network's website. Oops.
