The New York Times sent an e-mail to millions of readers on Wednesday afternoon apologizing for an earlier errant message. At around 10:30 a.m. PT, the Times sent an e-mail asking various readers, subscribers and non-subscribers, to reconsider cancelling their subscriptions.

The email sent out to readers said, “Dear home delivery subscriber, our records indicate that you recently requested to cancel your home delivery subscription. Please keep in mind when your delivery service ends, you will no longer have unlimited access to NYTimes.com and our NYTimes apps. We do hope you‘ll reconsider.” The email went out to about 8 million people when it was only mean for 300, causing mass confusion for readers that hadn’t cancelled anything.

Rumors began circulating that The Times mailing list had been hacked into. Rumors of a security breach were compounded when the New York Times itself tweeted: “If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.”

Media watchdog Jim Romenesko was able to get the first email explanation from The Times. “Dear colleague, please be aware that a spam message was sent broadly today with the subject line ‘Important information regarding your subscription.’ This email was not sent from The New York Times. If you received it, please delete it. We will be alerting subscribers immediately.”

However, only a couple of hours after NYT’s first response via twitter and email, Reuters (News - Alert) reported that a spokeswoman at the newspaper retracted the company’s previous emails saying that human error was actually the cause and there was no security breach.

The NYT issued a new statement saying: “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.”

The NYT said they are working on the error to prevent it from ever happening again. “We regret this error and we regret our earlier communication,” said The Times.