Thursday is Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day at many offices around the country.
The day gives parents a chance to bring their children -- and pets, depending on the office -- to their job for a day to see where they work.
Mashable reported that a brief moment of not paying attention at NPR's office led to the public radio going off the air for a full minute.
Gene Demby, who is the lead blogger for NPR's "Code Switch" team, tweeted an image that was taken "just a few minutes before" the incident.
Demby also seemed to know what the stop in the studio tour could lead to:
Gawker reported that Isabel Lara, NPR's director of media relations, confirmed the incident.
"During a bring your kids to work day tour today, some of our junior visitors pressed some buttons that affected a portion of the 11 a.m. ET newscast that can be heard on a limited number of West Coast stations," she wrote in an email. "Not all stations were affected. It was an educational day for us as well as our kids."
That newscast was "Morning Edition."
An apology email from an NPR engineering executive elaborated on what happened:
"This error was caused by the head of Engineering Department.
"As part of Take our Daughters to work day studio 42 demonstration, one of our junior journalists was (somehow) able to press the exact sequence, and perfectly timed live insert panel to insert studio 42 into the stream 1. I kid you not. Although labor laws prevent me from actually hiring the kid, (because) he does have a future, I gave him my card. This resulted in Studio 42 being inserted into the stream, causing a lengthy impairment.
"This outage is totally and completely my fault. Besides the justifiable public shaming I rightly deserve for the next decade-my lack of (oversight) caused the outage. Feel free to giggle at will. Thank you to the MOPS crew for getting us back on track, and triggering rapid notification."
Maybe next year more precautions will be taken.
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