It is said that this is one of the great fantasies of stars: knowing what the press will say about them after their death.
On Monday, dozens of personalities were able to satisfy this morbid curiosity, since RFI mistakenly published their obituaries on its website.
Among them, the Queen of England Elizabeth II, the actors Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo, the intellectual Noam Chomsky, but also the former Cuban president Raúl Castro.
The football star Pelé was also given for dead at 80 years old, which caused a great fright to his fans.
The former minister and businessman Bernard Tapie, whose obituary had already been inadvertently published on the World site in 2019, has once again seen his death wrongly announced.
In all, around a hundred articles have been published, according to RFI.
A technical problem
The articles, first published on the RFI website, were also posted on the media's Twitter account, before being automatically picked up by Google and several websites such as Yahoo!
News and MSN.
The explanation came a few minutes later in the form of a message posted on Twitter by RFI.
“
A technical problem has resulted in the publication of numerous obituaries on our site.
We are mobilized to rectify this major bug and apologize to those concerned,
”the media wrote.
More specifically, it is the migration of the site to a new content publication tool that has caused this dysfunction, RFI said.
In response, many Internet users were indignant that the obituaries of living people were already written, as if that amounted to burying them prematurely.
But this is in fact a common practice in the editors, since these articles which retrace the course of a life are often long and nuanced.
They may therefore require several days of work.
A delay incompatible with the treatment of the news, and which requires to get ahead.
"
As in all media, our journalists prepare in advance portraits of personalities so, if they were to disappear, to be able to quickly offer readers all the information they need to know about their journey,
" confirmed RFI.