NYT publishes article about watermelon on Mars, then deletes it. Twitter reacts

The New York Times accidentally published an article about Watermelon on Mars and deleted it later. However, it caught netizens' attention and screenshots of the now-deleted article have gone viral on social media.

The New York Times accidentally published an article which claimed that watermelons have been discovered on Mars and promptly deleted it on June 8. Jon Christian, the Managing editor of Futurism, took to Twitter to share screenshots of the now-deleted article."Fields of Watermelons Found on Mars, Police Say,” reads the headline of the NYT story and it reflected Joe Schmoe’s name in the byline.The article was quickly deleted after being published but by then, the damage had been done. Netizens had already taken notice of it and several screenshots of the article had been taken by then.Later, NYT released a statement, saying that the article was “published in error”. The statement is now linked to the article. What's happening at the NYT pic.twitter.com/Ff5L24zZNk I'd make a bet it was a CMS test, that got published by a tech person with full admin while doing a Q/A. I love the author though! we aren't aware of any space watermelons but we'll double check Definitely a QA test that accidentally went live on the production site. If that happened to us all of our apps would be full of Star Wars content We now know "ACK, ACK" roughly translates to "watermelon". pic.twitter.com/WfhAWAOjRL Giving rise to the Martian Watermelon Truthers pic.twitter.com/0QpyAf2Ujo The moon is made of cheese, and Mars is made of rindless watermelon Is it too much for me to want fake test articles to have an internal logic to them?I'd like to understand what was going through the mind of the person who wrote this fake article. Like, why would the POLICE be the source for fields of watermelons on Mars, and not, say, NASA? Space Watermelons pic.twitter.com/urcL60m8dt