11,543 Microsoft Employees Caught Up In Reply-All Email Chaos

Last Thursday, thousands of Microsoft employees found themselves caught up in email chaos when they were involved in an unwanted thread and received constant updates.  Some of them were annoying while some were absurd. According to an employee of Microsoft, about 11,543 Microsoft employees were the victim of this incident.

Microsoft declined to respond to a request for comment.

The incident began when a message was sent from an employee to everyone managing Microsoft’s GitHub. The content of the original message was how to modify GitHub settings to receive fewer notifications.

GitHub is a famous code-sharing website for programmers. Microsoft had contributed for GitHub for a long time before the company acquired the site for $7.5 billion last year. Since Microsoft has a significant influence on GitHub, it’s quite understandable that this message reached more than 11,000 people.

When the email arrived, some individuals committed a sin when pressing the Reply All button, asking to be removed from the mailing list. If the first email was sent to 11,543 receivers, obviously, the Reply All email was also sent to 11,540 people.

This is where the fun began: as a lot of other emails constantly replied all, begging to be removed. Others decided to tell jokes to their audience, some offered advice on how to turn off notification alert.

What’s worse, because of a bug, those unsubscribing kept getting resubscribed.

This chaos evoked a hilarious incident happened right at Microsoft.

Back in 1997, Microsoft was still finding a way to improve Exchange, its internal email server. For testing purposes, a list of email including 25,000 employees called Bedlam DL3 was created. An employee noticed their name is on the list and sent a reply asking to be removed.

Unfortunately, all 25,000 received that email. A series of emails emerged: some asking to be removed, some cracked jokes, some offered advice. “Me too!” was the most common reply from employees who want their addresses out of the list.

There were so many emails in the server that Microsoft’s Exchange collapsed two days after the accident.

To this day, Bedlam DL3 is still a legend at Microsoft. No one ever thinks that something like Bedlam DL 3 would occur again. People started naming this new incident something like Bedlam V2 or Gitlam.

The best advice to make sure that a similar incident never happens again is for you to do everyone a favor by not replying all when you’re on a list of a mass email.