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02nd Sep 2016

Foreign language page causes panic that ISIS have ‘hacked’ BBC

Bengali on platforms

Nooruddean Choudry

False alarm everyone. The British Broadcasting Corporation is not under cyber-terror attack.

Early on Friday evening at around 5.20pm, the BBC sent out an alert to subscribers to their news app, about a militant firefight in Bangladesh. But rather embarrassingly, they shared the story in Bengali rather than English.

It was of course a complete mistake and an awkward one at that. But alas these things happen, and the most you’d usually expect is for people to take the piss a bit on the internet and have a laugh at the Beeb’s expense.

Image result for bangladesh

However, it caused a huge panic for a great number of people, who very near shit themselves at the error. That’s because they mistook the Bengali characters for Arabic, and jumped to the conclusion that ISIS had hacked the BBC.

As you can see, many feared it was Islamic State propaganda invading their smartphones and tablets…

https://twitter.com/c_sixty7/status/771745100846211072

https://twitter.com/jackshingler/status/771747054238461953

Thankfully it was far from the case, and BBC Breaking News were quick to clarify the situation for their stressed out readers. Panic over and nothing to see here…

Not that that stopped s0me from expressing utter dismay at the knee-jerk reaction of those fearing a cyber-attack…

https://twitter.com/ethanharv/status/771754343812964352

https://twitter.com/Helsa0326/status/771757221776621569?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Blimey. What a drama over essentially nothing.

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Topics:

BBC,Internet,ISIS