When Dermot O'Leary announced Amelia Lily had won her place on the X Factor back, a lot of viewers thought the result had already been accidentally revealed on STV's website.

Many Twitter users thought the early leaking of the result meant it was a fix, but it was actually down to a technical problem.

The site had prepared four stories to cover each eventuality of James Michael, Amelia Lily, 2 Shoes and Jonjo Kerr being voted back in by the public.

Those four stories were mistakenly published before the voting lines had even closed, and were quickly removed but not before Google news had displayed them on its search pages.

STV released a statement to explain the error and apologise: “The STV web team prepared four draft stories regarding each returning contestant in anticipation of the result from tonight’s X Factor.

“The team always prepare articles to cover all eventualities and this week was no different.

“Due to a technical problem all four drafts went live on our website at approximately 20.10 tonight.

“The articles were online for a very short time and were removed as quickly as possible.

“The technical problem is currently being thoroughly investigated.

“We would stress that this was purely a technical error and would like to apologise to viewers.”

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