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State Dept E-mail Crash After "Reply-All" Storm

Posted by timothy on from the forward-this-story-to-all-your-friends-in-triplicate dept.

twistah writes "It seems that a recent 'reply-all storm' at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users 'reply-all' to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies asking to be taken off the errant list, but by the e-mail recall function, which generated further e-mail traffic. One has to wonder if capacity planning was performed correctly — should an e-mail system be able to handle this type of traffic, or is it an unreasonable task for even the best system?"

8 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bedlam... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Haha, sex change team.

  2. Thsi is a test... by Robin47 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Of the reply all button. Please do not respond with the reply all button. What they need is a reply some button.

  3. Mail to 'everyone', [click] by vawarayer · · Score: 5, Funny

    I remember my first year of college when I wanted to send Xmas greetings to 'everyone'. I remember, the IT director of the college running from computer lab to computer lab looking for student number xxyz.

    Fun times.

    1. Re:Mail to 'everyone', [click] by Toonol · · Score: 5, Funny

      Back in, oh, probably '90, the company I was working for had dumb terminals everywhere connected to a mainframe. They had just added a messaging feature, and one supervisor was messing around with it. She tried to send a message to her group, but accidentally sent it company-wide. The message was "IF YOU CAN READ THIS, RAISE YOUR HAND."

      I was supervising the call center at the time, and I saw hundreds of hands tentatively raising. The message probably went to two thousand people.

  4. Re:Bedlam... by russotto · · Score: 5, Funny

    http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx

    What's the M Sex Change Team? People who still haven't gotten over Judi Dench playing M? Come on, folks, M is a title, not a person; it's not a sex change!

  5. Re:Bedlam... by The+Dobber · · Score: 5, Funny

    I remember 10 or so years ago a disgruntled employee managed to send a heartfelt "Fuck You" to the entire 27,000+ employees as he was being given the heave ho.

    That one tied up the network for some period of time. I always wonder who the bright star was how had composed the distribution list for the entire company directory.

  6. Re:Bedlam... by MichaelSmith · · Score: 5, Funny

    That one tied up the network for some period of time.

    Thats why I always use qmail for my Fuck You messages.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  7. Re:Not the first time this has happened... by grahamsz · · Score: 5, Funny

    I saw a weird variant on that back in university.

    One of the engineering departments had a room full of (at the time) fairly high end sun workstations, and these were used both interactively and for people running longer compute jobs overnight.

    To facilitate overnight jobs, the admins had set up a round robin dns alias that updated every couple of seconds to point to the machine reporting the lowest load average.

    One of the students in my class had the bright idea of "If put 'ssh lowest' in my bashrc file, every time i open a terminal window it'll automatically pick the least loaded machine".

    Fast forward a few minutes and we've got 80 sun workstations which have all systematically ssh'd to each other and none of which will accept any new connections...