The Bank's Own Page Said the Decision Had Not Happened, Two Minutes After It Had.
At 12:02 UTC, two minutes after the Bank of England published its November decision, the Bank's own canonical page for that decision still said it had not happened — title ending "(to be published at 12pm)", body reading "will be published on 5 November 2026". The Monetary Policy Report page did the same. Appending a query string to the identical path returned the full release: Bank Rate 4%, an 8–1 vote, twenty-four paragraphs of minutes. One cache-buster was not enough — the first variant also served the placeholder, so two appendages against one path in one minute gave two different documents. A filter keyed to issuer confirmation would have stayed shut through the move it was built for, with no error code to branch on. The same event went wrong a second way in our own notes: an automated read of a Japanese publisher's 24-hour calendar block put the Bank of England at 22:30 Japan time, ninety minutes late, and in the same minute as US claims and productivity — a plausible cluster rather than an implausible orphan, so a plausibility check passes it. A slower second read of the same block gave 21:00, which is what the issuer says. Neither error was a source being wrong: both were introduced between the page and us, and an extraction fault survives adding a second source because the second source goes through the same extractor. Today's real stack in UTC, the thin consensus figures behind it, and the one sizing fact that matters: one-week dollar–yen implied volatility at 6.23%, the lowest since 22 October, on a tenor that covers tomorrow's payrolls.