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AP Twitter feed hacked; White House has NOT been bombed

The wire service's feed has been taken offline and AP corporate says tweets "reporting" a bombing are bogus.

Eric Mack Contributing Editor
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Eric Mack

The White House has NOT been bombed, folks, despite what you might have seen on the Associated Press Twitter account.

Hackers apparently got ahold of the wire service's Twitter feed and tweeted out "breaking" news of a White House bombing that injured President Barack Obama.

Not so, say the Twitter feeds of AP corporate and some employees.

When the tweet went out, Twitter immediately erupted with notes from sleuthing tweeps who noted that the suspicious tweet did not use the normal all caps style for BREAKING news, and was sent from the Web, which is unusual for the AP feed.

Need more proof that all is well at 1600 Pennsylvania? Well, there's a live press conference going on there now as I write this.

But the faux breaking news did manage to freak out markets enough to send the Dow Jones Industrial Average into a flash-fall, dipping more than 100 points before quickly recovering.

At the moment, the main @AP Twitter feed is offline. In another tweet, hacker group Syrian Electronic Army appears to be claiming responsibility for the fake tweet: