There's something fishy going on here. I don't really think that Bloomberg would fabricate the story out of whole cloth, so there has to be something there somewhere. It's possible that they were duped, but if they didn't make some efforts to corroborate the story, that would be shockingly poor journalism, the kind of thing you expect from the National Enquirer, not a major financial paper.
On the other side, it doesn't take much of a lapse in QA to let a single bad part through, when you are dealing with billions of components like Apple is.