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TIL in 1997, a Reply All storm took down all of Microsoft's internal Exchange system (techy.news)

submitted 1 year ago by techie@techy.news to c/sysadmin@lemmy.ml

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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

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[–] Noedel@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

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.