“We want to emphasise that this is a very unusual circumstance.”
*Warning: this story contains details of Wordle today.
Wordle players were left fairly confused this morning after the popular game left them with two possible answers.
Some users playing the popular game on Monday, May 9, were confused to discover that the game had changed the word due to a “major news event.”
Many users played the word ‘fetus’ today, the US spelling of ‘foetus’, only to discover that the word changed to ‘shine’ when they shared their results. Users who refreshed the page before playing seemed to be served the latter word with no change.
The New York Times, who recently acquired Wordle, said that the word had been loaded into the game last year, and was changed recently due to the aforementioned news event. According to reports last week, a draft opinion showed that the US Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights.
A statement issued by the newspaper today said that it was still working out “new challenges” as it migrated the game to “The Times’s technology.”
“Today, for example, some users may see an outdated answer that seems closely connected to a major recent news event,” they said. “This is entirely unintentional and a coincidence – today’s original answer was loaded into Wordle last year.
“At New York Times Games, we take our role seriously as a place to entertain and escape, and we want Wordle to remain distinct from the news. But because of the current Wordle technology, it can be difficult to change words that have already been loaded into the game.
“When we discovered last week that this particular word would be featured today, we switched it for as many solvers as possible […] We want to emphasise that this is a very unusual circumstance.”
