Updated Dec. 28, 2011, 10:32 p.m.

The New York Times sent an email by mistake to the approximately 8 million registered users of the its website, NYTimes.com, Wednesday morning confirming the cancellation of their home delivery services. The email was intended for only a few hundred of the paper's subscribers.

It took awhile for the Times to sort out the error.

Initially, the Times claimed the emails were spam and not sent by the newspaper:

But two hours later, the paper issued another statement:

Minutes later, that statement was amended:

The paper's reporters scooped its public relations department, when Brian Stelter, the Times' digital media reporter, posted information to Twitter from his colleague, Amy Chozick, a corporate media reporter:

Chozik posted her updates to the paper's Media Decoder blog.

Elieen Murphy, vice president of corporate communications, later issued this statement by email: 

An email was sent earlier today from The New York Times in error.  This email should have been sent to a very small number of subscribers, but instead was sent to a vast distribution list made up of people who had previously provided their email address to The New York Times. We regret the error. 

It appears that most of the recipients either did not cancel their home delivery subscriptions or were not subscribers.

(Disclosure: The Bay Citizen produces The New York Times’ regional Bay Area Report, which appears in print on Fridays and Sundays as well as on NYTimes.com.)

Social media has been abuzz with colorful commentary about the supposed spam.