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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] 8 points 1 year ago

Not all vets have seen combat, even if they have deployed. But aside from that most of these vets were early 20s that did one enlistment and are fresh out of active, so their life experience up until that point was high school to military to college. Not all of them, but a significant amount. That being said, even at the time I would've found the absurd response funny, except it meant more work for me that week to draft communication on behalf of the office.