Ex-Michigan State basketball player Nick Ward is not dead

We all spend our quarantines in a variety of ways. Some spend their days binging Netflix, others play board games and complete puzzles. Meanwhile, somebody is spending their time hacking Nick Ward’s Instagram account to announce the former Michigan State basketball player could be dead soon.

Ward is playing in the G League but is most remembered as the big man for the Spartans team that made the Final Four last season. He popped up on the Twitter timeline today with a screenshotted Instagram post floating around that showed a picture of him with a caption that said:

“Nick is currently in battle for his life in the hospital as we speak prayers for him.”

Grammar and punctuation need work, but the message was delivered as social media freaked out for a while with tons of T’s and P’s being sent Ward’s way. Also, how in the hell does a post like that get that many likes? Lots of the screenshots were deleted, and some showed thousands of likes. People thought there was a chance Nick Ward was going to be dead, is that worthy of an Instagram double tap?

Thankfully, Chris Solari of the Detroit Free Press got a hold of Nick’s brother Nate Ward, who said the account was hacked and they’re trying to figure out who did it.

Nick Ward’s Instagram is private and he hasn’t posted anything on Twitter, so we hope all is well in the Nick Ward world.

Everybody stay safe, wash your hands and do what the experts tell you to do. And if you can help it, try not to hack a person’s social media account to announce they might die.