IBM was forced to apologize after drop-down menus on an American recruiting site asked applicants to identify themselves with several racially insensitive terms: "yellow," "mulatto," and "coloured." Unsurprisingly, this sparked outrage on Twitter. A video is available here.

It seems pretty clear what happened here. The form actually had two different menus that said "Please state your ethnic group"—which is strange on its own. One of the menus asked applicants to choose from options including "White," "Black," "Yellow," "Mulato," and "Not a Brazil National." The other included "Afrian," "Coloured," and "Not a South African National."

The first menu seems to be a clumsy translation of Brazilian racial categories. The Brazilian census uses the Portuguese word "amarelo" (yellow) to describe Brazilians of Asian descent. The census also has an official category for "pardos"—Brazilians of mixed race.

Similarly, while the term "colored" long ago fell out of favor in the United States, the British spelling is still considered a non-derogatory term for some mixed-race individuals in South Africa.

Clearly, code from Brazilian and South African job sites got accidentally inserted into an IBM intern application used in the United States. IBM itself has operations in both Brazil and South Africa, and perhaps IBM uses the same hiring software around the world. Somehow, wires got crossed and elements from South African and Brazilian applications got inserted into an American form, causing IBM serious embarrassment.