Comment by tantalor
> which it blamed on a "technical error"
It's not a technical error at all!
Technical errors are faults caused by technology, like a software or hardware bug. That's not what happened here. WordPress behaved exactly as it was supposed to.
The true cause is revealed later in the article,
> staff thought they had applied safeguards to prevent early publication, there were two errors in the way in which they were set up
The problem was the staff. It's a human error.
I don't think that's a worthwhile distinction. All software bugs are human errors, since the machine is correctly following the human programmer's incorrect instructions; whether that's at the level of assembly instructing the CPU; or a higher level like Wordpress instructing the PHP interpreter; or an even higher level of a document hosting solution instructing Wordpress.