A guy named Vince spurred a 'reply all' disaster at Reuters

Published August 27, 2015
 
Ever done something you wished you could take back?
 
Like accidentally sent an email to 33,000 Thomson Reuters employees?
 
That's what some guy named Vince apparently did Wednesday, flooding inboxes and setting off a "reply all" chain that some say slowed down Reuters email and provided the Internet with Twitter gold, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Some tweets using the #ReutersReplyAllGate hashtag expressed frustration at the hundreds of reply-all emails asking people to stop replying to all, while others used the chaos to grab their 15 minutes of fame (being listed in the "to" field) and laugh at the inherent inanity of it all.

"Should I just start live tweeting every single reply?" one recipient wondered, while another called for extraordinary assistance, imploring, "Any Super Hero currently in the U.S. Your help is needed to stop this email chain." But as the debacle continues to generate fresh reply-all emails this morning, what's happened to poor Vince?

One Reuters worker remains concerned, tweeting, "Where is Vince? Hope he's ok! #ReutersReplyAllGate #prayforvince."

First thing to do on any mail system is disable or restrict any method to send mail to all recipients.  Wait until someone asks FOR it, rather than having a mess like this.  Then limit the total number of recipients a message can use.  Again, waiting until someone asks for it  and then beating the living shit out of them for asking.  Well, not really, but they'd damned well better have a legitimate use case for it.
 
Microsoft folks will remember Bedlam DL3.

Just a nice picture.
 

Reminds me of when someone at my company was looking for a small Christmas tree to decorate one of the areas for the holidays. Probably about 20 years ago before things became so PC. Anyway, they sent out an email but somehow instead of just sending it to the local people, sent it to ALMOST all of the company worldwide. Somehow someone was able to figure out that it wasn't everyone - not sure how that was done and don't remember how they figured out that fact. But then people in Mexico and Europe replied all to say things like "No, I don't have one. And even if I did I am in Mexico." Some even jumped in, replying to all, to tell others not to reply all! It took the system about 5 minutes just to load the recipient list. IT jumped in and told everyone to NOT reply and delete the messages. Took about a day for the system to recover. I thought it was all quite funny!

Isn't this why BCC was invented ?

And yes I've lived through too many of these. A couple with large file attachments and company mail lists. IT was very grumpy that day.

If you read that Bedlam link you can get a feel for just how dramatically the messaging load spins out of control.  In the 'old days' (1990's-ish) it could be a real disaster.  Initially most systems were limited to the number of people they served and those folks basically knew what it took to get messages delivered.  Nobody was dumb enough to reply all in those situations.  But then it became clear that everyone being able to use e-mail would be a good thing, that and e-mail clients became indirectly cheap enough to avoid per-seat favoritism problems.  A factor anyone coming online these days would find seriously odd, but that's how it was. Then there was AOL.  The floodgates opened and things have gone downhill ever since.  <shakes fist>
 
It still comes up now and then on mailing lists, whether they should be informational (reply-to-sender) or conversational (reply-to-all).  If the membership is small enough, and values each other's 'inbox' then it's usually OK to use reply-all.  But there's always that one idiot...

Maybe I am just reading too much into the little email debacle; well it is entertaining.

It could be related to arrested development; skipping a step in learning process or regression due to some physiological issue or a trauma to the head causing a permanent foci for a seizure or even a "me first" issue relating to some folks ideas that the world revolves around them with not a semblance of a care of anything or anybody else or just didn't know what 'reply all' meant.

My children (when ~3-4 YO) would cover their eyes and ask me if I could see them many years ago while playing hide and go seek.
 
Sometimes I would say yes and sometimes I would say no. They did have fun in their magical world of innocence.
 

I remember a big one back in the days at Xerox - with the "Remove me from this list" echoing throughout 40,000 users one after another, bringing the system to its knees over 3 days.  Xerox Corporate Security was so mad they shut off the email of everyone who replied and gave them a stern talking to before their email was turned back on.
 
Even recently at my current company, someone tried to send an email to 1,000 customers.  They were smart in putting them all on BCC, but then the message failed to send because  Office 365 has a hard limit of 500 people (the IT administrators have no control of this setting to make it higher or lower).  So, end user cut it down to 500 people per email and sent out two - but forgot to use BCC the second time.  Take two email threads with ~500 customers - some happy and some not, flaming on and because they're external to the organization, there's nothing that can be done to stop it.  Many have taken the opportunity to get on their soapbox if disgruntled and try to rally others to join their cause.  All any of us can do is sit back and watch and wait for it to die off.
 
Luckily there is a restriction on any all-office or all-company boxes; just the other day someone sent an HR policy out, to which some genius did a reply-all with some very personal information about her pay and how it was split across her bank accounts.  Luckily the policy requiring administrative approval for those not authorized to send to those lists saved her.  

I sometimes get the impression that Amazon's "Customer Questions and Answers" section on many of the product pages works a lot like the "Reply All" in the OP.  Many times, rather than say nothing, people would post inane replies like "I have no idea."  Do they honestly think that Amazon has asked the question just to them individually, and not to a larger group, so they feel obligated to respond?  If I type in a question, does Amazon then email my question to everyone who ever bought that product and then post their unfiltered replies?. Not quite the same as the OP, because it lacks the feedback loop, but in some ways similar.  

Over the years have seen similiar debaucles with email. 
 
Curious now what is the corporate choice for email?
 
Over the last 10 years have mostly seen Microsoft, Lotus and more recently Google mail and a shift to cloud based services.
 
Here in the midwest seen many small to medium sized offices go to MS Office 365 while too have noted that CPS has gone to using Google mail.  (thinking they got it for free?).
 
Interesting the mention of Amazon. 
 
Unrelated to OP I do post comments and sometimes fixes for garbage products along with my comments about said products.  First I think I mentioned that the product was recalled for some ill concieved design, the a DIY fix (not easy) for same product.  (one was a vacumn cleaner (Electrolux) and another was my rechargable tooth brush).
 
I have gotten flamed right on the comments section relating to my comments. 
 
I have then written to Amazon about issues and have had those flaming posts removed.