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Fast Company Hacked to Send Obscene Push Alerts on Apple News

The account was disabled after a pair of offensive push alerts appeared on people's Apple News feeds.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Fast Company took down its website after the business news outlet's Apple News channel was used to send a pair of obscene and racist messages, the company said late Tuesday.

Fast Company said a hack of its content management system gave hackers access to its publishing tools, including the ability to send push alerts on Apple News. The messages appeared about a minute apart around 5:18 p.m. PT but were quickly deleted from the page.

"The messages are vile and not in line with the content and ethos of Fast Company," the company said in a series of tweets. "We are investigating the situation and have suspended the feed & shutdown FastCompany.com until we are certain the situation has been resolved."

Fast Company's website was displaying a 404 error message, meaning the site couldn't be found, at the time of this writing.

When asked to comment on the incident, Apple directed CNET to a tweet that said it had disabled the account after "an incredibly offensive alert" appeared on Fast Company's channel.