Connecticut Department of Transportation officials have been causing confusion on Twitter by sending out a serious of bogus messages about a ferry sinking -- and they say it’s not the work of a hacker.
Over the past few days, messages that said the Connecticut River Ferry sank, ran out of fuel or floated “out to sea” after colliding with another boat have been posted on the department’s Twitter page, mixed with real alerts about construction work and traffic delays.
“We were doing some test tweets from a separate account,” department spokesman Kevin Nursick told CTPost.com on Wednesday. “We were backfilling with some funny ones while we worked out how to add the ferry information to our Twitter feed.”
“Ferry Update: Rocky Hill Ferry sank to the bottom of the river after being struck by the Chester Ferry,” one tweet read.
Nursick said the account “definitely has not been hacked” and the messages came from the State-Development sub account, which is also operated by the department.
He added that the department will take the tweets down.
“We also won’t use any more silly tweets,” Nursick told CTPost.com.
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