The New York Times, a leading news portal in the US, has offered a mea culpa after a controversial story it published earlier this week originally titled, “The Blobs in Your Tea? They’re Supposed to Be There” sparked an online outcry for its inappropriate wordings.

In the feature story by Joanne Kaufman illustrating the booming popularity of the beverage in the US by eyeing on a local bubble tea chain “Boba Guys,” the drink, which has been catching on the American land for around two decades, was described as “curious amalgam washed ashore in the United States a few years back,” with the chewy and gelatinous bubbles dubbed as “blobs,” which could also be interpreted as “stains.”

The Asian region, where the drink was originated and has since got well-received, was even called “the Far East” by the author, which has been thought by many overseas Asians as being offensive.

Since the article was published on Wednesday on the official websites of the NYT, many netizens have flooded to Facebook and Twitter to deplore its expressions with parts of them featuring a stark contrast with the facts while some others demonstrating racist implications.

“Seriously? New York Times article on bubble tea like it’s 1999,” @angryasianman commented on Twitter while reposting the story, pointing that the article describing the drink as being “relatively new to the mass market in the United States” did not conform to reality where the pearl milk tea has been in vogue for decades in the country.

“Your food blog needs more Asian friends,” @e_alexjung noted slamming the racism the article demonstrated.

His stance was backed by a journalist from Los Angeles Times identified as Frank Shyong. “This NYT boba piece, besides being comically late & breathtakingly stupid, is exactly why we need diverse newsrooms,” he said on Twitter.

Following the extensive online backlash, New York Times revised title of the story into “Bubble Tea, Long aNiche Favorite, Goes Mainstream in the US” and made a drastic modification of the previous text, which saw controversial words describing the beverage including “exotic,” “alien,” and “concoction” removed.  

The sentence “The curious amalgam became a hit in Taiwan and was subsequently embraced throughout the Far East,” was also seen being revised into “After becoming a hit in Taiwan, bubble tea was embraced throughout Asia.”

Taking a step further to appease the online outrage, the news website eventually changed the headline into “Bubble Tea Purveyors Continue to Grow Along with Drink’s Popularity” on Thursday along with an editor’s note extending mea culpa for the archived story.

In the note under the name of “Our Readers Call Us Out Over Bubble Tea. They Are Right.” Ellen Pollock, the newspaper’s business section editor said “some thought that the article read as though we had just discovered bubble,” while some others “thought we described the drink, which was created in Taiwan, as strange and alien, and especially took us to task for the use of word ‘blobs’.”

“In retrospect, we wish we had approached the topic differently (if at all). There may be a story in the expansion of bubble tea businesses in the United States, but there is no denying the drink has been around for quite a while. And we regret the impression left by some of the original language in the article, which we have revised in light of the concerns,” reads the note, adding NYT thanks readers for sharing their views and would like to establish a deeper tie with its audience.

Boba tea, also known as bubble or pearl tea, was believed to be invented in Taiwan almost 30 years ago when a teahouse owner poured the tapioca balls from her pudding into a glass of iced Assam tea in 1988. Prevailing throughout Asia in 1990s, the milk tea with special gummy boba ingredients started to become increasingly available on the east and west coasts of the United States in 2000s, according to Los Angeles Times.

Despite that the neither of the boba tea brands in the US has yet to reach anything like Starbucks scale, the craze for the drinks in the country could be seen through the soaring number of milk tea shops alongside boulevards of major cities like New York. Vivi Bubble Tea, a franchise business, has 45 shops all over the country, while CoCo Fresh Tea and Juice based in Taiwan owns 32 locations in the country with 22 of them in New York City.