It appears that "fake news" has finally made it to the news wires.

Shortly after the market open, Dow Jones blasted a story that "in a surprise to everyone who is alive" Google was buying Apple for $9 billion. It said that Google CEO Larry Page had "secret talks with the now-deceased Steve Jobs in 2010 to firm up the deal" which was announced when Jobs' will was read in Cupertino. As a result, each Google shareholder would get 9 shares of Apple stocks, and the report added that "obviously Google will move into Apple's fancy shareholders. Google employees said, "Yay."

The release was accompanied by a flurry of machine-readible headlines on Bloomberg and other news services:

DJ Tech Giant Apple Buys Google

DJ Story, No Flash Heds, With A Different Wires Hed

DJ Now I'm Sending the Fill

DJ And Here Is a Third One

DJ Here Is a Second Flash Hed to Check Chaining

DJ Here Is the First Flash to Check Chaining

DJ This Is a Test Flash Headline

DJ Fourth headline, worth a try

DJ Fourth headline, try two

DJ Fourth headline, try one

DJ Second Try Headline, Gets Orphan Status For Acute Myeloid Leukemia

DJ Second try headline, second one

DJ Second try headline, first one

DJ Here Is Another Hed to Be Published a Day Later to See if Chaining Wor

DJ Here is a Second Update Hed

DJ Now I am Testing Out the Update Hed

DJ This Is My Fill Hed

DJ And Here Is a Third

DJ This Is a Second Hed of the Chaining Test

DJ This Is a Test of the Chaining Mechanism

DJ UPDATE: Apple Says Google Buy Will Be Difficult

DJ Apple CEO: Google Is Really Awesome

DJ UPDATE: Apple Says Google Buy Will Be Difficult

Well, apparently the algos ignored the ridiculous details and the laughable purchase price and promptly sent the price of Apple surging to $158, if only for a few seconds...

We can only imagine the avalanche of furious phone calls into Dow JOnes, because moments ago a Dow Jones spokesman announced to "Please disregard the headlines that ran on Dow Jones Newswires between 9:34 a.m. ET and 9:36 a.m. ET." He said that "due to a technical error, the headlines were published. All of those headlines are being removed from the wires. We apologize for the error."

Of course, by the time it was retracted, the initial momentum had pushed the world's most valuable stock higher, and dragged the Nasdaq higher with it.

That said, it begs the question: how could such a glaring, and hugely market moving error have made it to the production platform, where it impacted thousands of headline scanning algos.

Finally, was this "fake news" also Vladimir Putin's fault?