It started off with an employee sending an email to a distribution list called “Bedlam DL3” asking to be taken off the list. With 13,000 recipients and everyone replying all with, “Me too!” and other messages, it was estimated that over 15 million messages were sent through the system in an hour. This crashed the MTA service due to a recipient limit. Each time the MTA service recovered, it would attempt to resend the message again which lead to a crash loop.
As a result of the incident, the Exchange team introduced message recipient limits and distribution list restrictions to Exchange, which is something we all use today!
More on the story here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/me-too/ba-p/610643
cross-posted from: https://techy.news/post/2224
This is fascinating! Great TIL!
Good old bedlam DL3
A while ago someone at my company resigned and then sent a leaving message to all 2000 employees.
The reply all storm that followed was hilarious. I have no idea how general staff was able to use the all staff distribution group.
I love this story. We have preventive measures in place because of chaos like this. Back in the early 2010s I was doing a VA internship at my college’s Veterans Affairs office. We would help other veteran students manage their GI Bill and other VA benefits as well as communicate events for our student vet community. The school used a student veteran distribution list just like this story but for a much smaller group of users.
One day the college’s VA office sent out an email that a prominent anti war vet was coming to speak at the college which sparked a lot of controversy apparently with a good portion of the members of that DL. So much so that a reply all chain began and my student email inbox was blowing up from all the outrage. If I remember correctly, the event was ultimately canceled because so many student veterans were complaining.
Like the two people configuring an auto reply when they went on holidays …
You can figure out the rest I guess, fun even if it wasn’t 15 million mails in an hour :-)
A coworker of mine and I had auto replies set up back in the day to do this on purpose. If either of us emailed the other we’d take down the server. It went on for months and we passed each other notes instead of emailing. It was our own private cold war.
He accidentally sent a company wide email instead of his contact list that excluded me. We were banned from auto replying to each other after that.
