Eamonn provided some colour to that during the release at the time already:
“Newswires published the q/q initially at +6.8% q/q. Which is far beyond the realms of the likely. I mean, that’d be a gazillion sigma event or something. So, yeah, you may have seen +6.8% reported via various sources that, um, didn’t really think that through. Hair-trigger social media (and other media!) has its dangers. A wee bit of circumspection helps.”
But now we’re seeing the NZ statistics office come out to apologise for said error:
“This error is the responsibility of Stats NZ, there was no fault of the wire agencies. We apologize to all affected customers. The issue was caused by human error and Stats NZ is reviewing its processes to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”