Cynet Systems, an IT staffing and recruiting service, has apologized for a racist job ad that went viral. The original ad seemed normal enough except for one detail. The company was looking for someone “Preferably Caucasian” to fill a mid-senior level business development position.

When one Twitter user saw the job posted on Linkedin, a hail storm of comments followed.

Cynet said that it has fired the employees involved in posting the ad.

“Cynet apologizes for the anger & frustration caused by the offensive job post. It does not reflect our core values of inclusivity & equality,” the company said on its LinkedIn page. “We will take this as a learning experience & will continue to serve our diverse community.”

Cynet Co-CEO Ashwani Mayur also released a statement that was posted to the LinkedIn page clarifying that the company has a long-standing policy to “refuse any request to list jobs only seeking candidates of any specific ethnicity, gender, or other inappropriate restrictions.”

“We understand why some may have been upset seeing this listing because we were too,” Mayur said. He noted that Cynet is 60 percent minority and is “proud to be an immensely diverse company.

Cynet says its also putting practices in place to make sure something like this never happens again.

This is an obvious form of employment discrimination, which is illegal. But how does a blatantly racist job posting like this even make its way on the internet?  Why would a group of people responsible for vetting and editing the description before it was shown to the entire world think it was ok? These are questions we may never get the answer to.

Tech’s diversity problems are well known by now, and postings like these are kind of ironic because they confirm what most Black and brown folks working in the industry already know.  Which is that the industry’s diversity problems stem from internal biases among people responsible for recruiting and hiring.

It’s good that Cynet apologized, but something like this should have never happened in the first place.