It's purposefully alarmist. "[Equifax] casually misplace[d] 2.5 million lives" sounds much more dramatic than "Equifax revised their estimate of the number of affected customers by +1.7%."
"Ah, s--- we got hacked."
"How many users?"
"145,534,902"
"Ouch, that's a lot. Let's say it was 143,000,000."
"He he he, nice."
---
I've misplaced more bytes in a megabyte.
E.g. I say one million but it turns out to be 1.05 million.