Months of rumors, which no doubt corresponded to ongoing negotiations, and then about a month ago a single VentureBeat reporter claimed a final deal was "confirmed" by anonymous sources. A lot of people were skeptical of a single unsourced claim, and seemingly rightly so.
"Before, we had only off-the-record reports from possibly-official sources that something might be happening. Now, we have off-the-record reports from definitively official sources that something might be happening. But we can't, y'know, prove that."