Apple users searching for the name Reuven Rivlin on the popular Siri app late Saturday were subjected to an unusual description of the Israeli president who was characterized as the leader of "the Zionist occupation state."
The incident, which turned out to be a technical malfunction, caused wide-spread outrage in social media with many users reporting the problem to the tech giant.
Siri, the voice-controlled personal assistant, enables owners of Apple devices to voice commands to the app in order to perform a string of tasks. The app also apparently extracts information from Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia which anyone can freely edit.
Rivlin’s English-language Wikipedia page was apparently hacked sometime on Saturday, causing Siri to extract the incorrect data.
According to a Channel 12 report on Saturday, an anonymous user named “The Arab Man” hacked the Wikipedia page and edited the president's biography, describing him as the "president of the Zionist occupation state."
According to the report, it took Wikipedia several minutes to fix the problem, but not before a few more mistakes had been made, such as Rivlin being described as “the main child of Israel.”