A fire broke out Monday afternoon in parts of the historic Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and as people around the world watched the live broadcast of the fire on YouTube, some viewers watched a few videos of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The YouTube algorithm, which provides news from reliable sources, has been accompanied by an automated dashboard displaying videos from Wikipedia and the British Encyclopedia.
But there were no reports that the Notre Dame Cathedral was a terrorist attack, so why did the dashboard display these videos?
The YouTube Dashboard, launched last year, aims to provide more reliable news of controversial events.
According to the company's description of the painting, the paintings aim to address "a small number of well-established historical and scientific topics that were often subject to false information over the Internet."
But it made a mistake in this case and published passages that make the scenes link the fire of the unknown cathedral to attacks in America 18 years ago, although it is not yet clear what started the fire in the Parisian cathedral.
Officials told BBC News that the fire could be linked to the ongoing construction of the historic structure and did not hint that it was a terrorist attack or that the fire was deliberate.
The impact of the error was geographically limited. The service was shown to viewers in the United States and South Korea, and YouTube viewers in France did not see September 11 information when watching the video about the fire.
A spokesman for YouTube told Business Insider that the link had happened by mistake. "We are deeply saddened by the continuing fire at Notre Dame Cathedral," a spokesman for the Business Insider website said.
"Last year we launched information boards with links to external sources such as Wikipedia and the British Encyclopedia to fight misinformation. These panels are run automatically, and our systems sometimes do the wrong thing," he said.