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The NHS's 1.2 Million Employees Are Trapped in a 'Reply-All' Email Thread (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Business Insider report:The NHS's 1.2 million employees are currently trapped in a "reply-all" email hell. A "test" email was accidentally sent to everyone who works at the UK health service - prompting a series of reply-all responses from annoyed recipients going out to all 1-million-plus employees of the organisations. An NHS employee told Business Insider that there have been at least 120 replies so far -- meaning that more than 140 million needless emails have been sent across the NHS's network today. As a result, they said, its email systems are running "very slow today." The NHS Pensions department is currently warning people on Twitter that "if contacting us by email please be aware that there may be delays in responding due to an issue currently affecting all NHS mail."
Please remove me from this distribution, I don't know how I got on it.
...email was God's gift to business. Transformative, empowering, a paradigm-shift.
It's Satan that added Reply-all, and then BCC just to continue the general fuckery.
-Styopa
Obligatory Dilbert:
http://dilbert.com/strip/2003-04-06
A bean counter at a local hospital sent out an email to everyone that explained the cost in lost productivity for each "reply all" email was $0.08 per person. Not surprisingly, someone hit the "reply all" button to respond that the bean counter's email cost the hospital $800 in lost productivity. It went downhill from there. Not sure if the tab was $80,000 or $800,000 in lost productivity when everyone stopped hitting "reply all" button. Executive management wasn't amused.
Which requires an Emergency Change Request (which takes hours to get approved for a Sev 2).
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
i worked at NG for 7 years, and there were several instances (the last one being in 2010) where email system company-wide was crippled or knocked offline by an email that was sent to the wrong mailing list. apparently, there was one available that included literally every single person in the system (probably about 100,000 people).
i remember one morning in about 2008 or so, getting an email addressed to some team i wasn't a part of, seeing the "CC" list was several miles long, and i knew instantly what was going to happen. i guess the "first post" instinct in me acted up for the first time ever. i knew we were all already doomed, so i hit reply-all and simply posted: "oh no, not again." i did manage to be first, but before i could blink, i had over a thousand new emails all saying some variation of "WHAT IS THIS?" "REMOVE ME FROM THIS LIST" and "STOP REPLYING FOR GODS SAKE". my new emails hit 30,000 in a few minutes.
the entire NG email system was down for more than a day.
two days later i got called into my boss's office and he explained that top-tier management at NG had demanded that i be fired. my "oh no not again" was the last email most people saw before the system exploded. a very heated conversation between my supervisors and NG executives apparently just barely saved my job, but my supervisors were not pleased either and mentioned this would go on my permanent record (i thought that was just a high school thing). it didn't matter that i didn't actually do anything to cause the crash. i had merely made myself visible at the wrong time, and NG wanted someone's head.
so glad i don't work there now.
i could live a little longer in this prison
I lived through one at a large, global financial company. It was kind of humorous.
Some lady in a small European office of the company attended a company sponsored Halloween party dressed as a policewoman. Part of her costume included mirror sunglasses. She happened to misplace them at the party.
So the Monday after the party she sent an email to her group explaining the situation and asking for everyone to look for them. We were on Lotus Notes and she accidentally chose * (iirc) instead of her groups distribution list. So 30,000 people across the world got the email.
The funny part is that every smart ass in the company decided to have fun with it. Reply alls started flooding the network with messages such as "Looked in my office in Germany and can't find them", "Not in Wisconsin office", and "Didn't find them but did find handcuffs, you want those?". Went on for hours and basically took the email system down for 2 days.
The worst part is that they had a few of the servers mis-configured or something because anyone who had an auto out of office reply would respond to all with that message, which would then trigger the other out of office replies again.
Everyone spent a really long time removing tens of thousands of emails from their mailboxes.