As many confused friend groups have likely discovered, Wordle had a bit of a glitch today. It seems that when The New York Times took ownership of the game, they removed at least one word that was likely to frustrate users. However, due to the nature of caching and redirects, this change did not roll out to everyone simultaneously. Namely: If you already had your tab open to the old Wordle URL, and nothing caused your browser to auto-refresh over the last few days, you probably got the “frustrating” word. If you refreshed for any reason, you probably got the “easier” updated one.

I was curious to get an answer as to how this happened, and to let completists get a chance to play both. So I cloned the cached version of the Wordle game code from before the New York Times migration. To ensure that no one mistakes this for the real Wordle, I’ve removed all correct answers beyond today’s (a rather chaotic thing to do without spoiling future games for myself, involving a lot of find-and-replace, eye crossing, squinting, etc…). These game clones will forever be stuck in the two February 15th universes, and are in no way meant to replace the original: I am not in the business of stealing traffic.

Here is the original (“frustrating”) February 15th game.

And here is an updated version with the NYT-approved (“easier”) word.

Now you can settle this amongst your friends: who had the harder word?

Note: Your statistics are tied to site-specific data stored locally on your device. That means playing this won’t modify your actual Wordle stats.

Fun fact: For those who still haven’t refreshed by tomorrow, their February 16th word will actually be the NYT-approved February 15th word most folks got today. So prepare for another wave of confusion!