Is there an English word for blaming wrongfully, either intentionally or unintentionally?

Short question is: if someone accused another person wrongfully, either intentionally or unintentionally, is there a single verb for this action?

For example, I was supposed to style a title short and nice and with ellipses (the ...) under a photo for a dynamic website, for any photo and any title, and I finished the task. The title is about 80% of the photo's width.

The next day, the title became only 20% wide under the photo on the live website. The program manager said to me in the online chat, "What the hell is going on. I don't know what your definition of short is, man."

It turned out it was one of the two junior programmers forgetting to set some files to be non-cached on the web server. So some files were new, some files were outdated, so it wasn't related to my work, but related to some other people's oversight.

The program manager never said sorry anyway.

In this case, is there a verb that describes what the program manager did. That he "wrongfully accused". In some other language, there is a single verb for it, but I haven't seen such a word in English.

Solution 1:

malign

to speak harmful untruths about; speak evil of; slander; defame

(dictionary.com)

Edit:

I was thinking some more about your question, especially the "either intentionally or unintentionally" part. Slander is very intentional. Malign, maybe a little less so, but still maybe too much. Here's another idea, which doesn't assume ill will:

jump to conclusions

If you jump to conclusions, you judge a situation quickly and emotionally without having all the facts: It’s not fair to jump to conclusions about a whole group of people based on one incident.

Solution 2:

I think slander is fairly similar to what you're looking for. However, slander doesn't have to be an accusation, and the word usually connotes an intentional lie (although you could slander someone unintentionally).

"Falsely accused" is the phrase I've usually heard in that situation, although that's usually in legal contexts.