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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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 :-)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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.