Oops! Apple's big news was accidentally leaked hours early and no one was ready for the response

Programmers on Thursday got a nice surprise from Apple, when the company kept its promise to make its popular new programming language Swift, "open source."

That means that anyone can download the language, use it, see how it's put together, and make and share changes.

Within 30 minutes of the announcement, the news had already gone viral on Hacker News and Reddit, and the website Swift.org was struggling to keep up.

There was just one problem. Although Apple had promised to make the code available via GitHub (the website where such open source projects are shared), the code wasn't there.

Programmers simply found an empty GitHub page.

Everyone was speculating that the Swift.org site was accidentally leaked live by mistake.

And yes, Business Insider learned that this is exactly what happened. All was supposed to go live later in the day, at 1 p.m. Eastern.

And then, it was a what-the-heck moment. They left it live and let everyone stay in suspense for a few hours until the actual files were made public on Github.

Apple had actually promised that it would open source Swift months ago, so everyone knew this day was coming sooner or later.

The files are now available, and the project has zoomed to the top of the trending charts on Github, too.