An e-mail telling more than 8 million New York Times subscribers that their accounts were canceled was sent erroneously by the newspaper and was not spam, the Times says.
Update at 4:45 p.m. ET: The Times now says that a subscription-cancellation e-mail received by 8.6 million subscribers and others was not spam but was "mistakenly" sent by an employee. "We regret that the error was made, but no one's security has been compromised," said said a Times Company spokeswoman.
As The Washington Post points out, Times corporate media reporter Amy Chozick tweeted that the e-mail should have reached only about 300 people.
"We apologize for any confusion this may have caused," the paper says in an e-mail and in a front-page "note to readers."
Original post: The New York Times says a mass e-mail notice to home subscribers and others warning that their account was canceled was likely spam.
At one point, the newspaper's "customer care" site online was knocked off for more than an hour.
The Times' media blog Media Decoder quotes a newspaper spokesperson as saying the e-mail, which offered customers a discount if they reconsidered their purported cancellation, appears to be spam.
But the blog's Amy Chozick reports that some people familiar with the Times' technical operation suggested it might be an erroneous mass e-mail.
In any case, here is what The Times tweeted:
If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It's not from us.
Another media blog, JimRomanesko.com quotes from an corporate note to Times' employees in which the e-mail is called a "spam message."
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