But that's also 404 now, here's a cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NAz9uOi...
And here's a copy of the article text: http://pastebin.com/Y5CUPqDJ
They talked to Moxie about it, so it doesn't look like a hoax. More like it wasn't supposed be announced yet.
It goes without saying that this would be a big deal. And it would explain a lot of the slow movement w.r.t. an iOS client. Although The Verge wasn't sure if and when the encryption would be available on iOS. And WhatsApp is closed source software, something that's unlikely to change, which really isn't what we want from a secure messenger. So I might keep Text Secure installed for the time being.
But still. OTR (and the enhanced/modified version of it TextSecure is using) is probably the easiest to use way to communicate in a reasonably secure fashion, and it'd would be fantastic to see it used by hundreds of millions of users all of a sudden -- even if it's sitting on top of insecure mobile operating systems and untrusted-yet-privileged hardware.