"If everyone would just stop replying, this would end! Why are you all still hitting reply all?!"
-latest reply all on every reply-all storm.
In my early days at Amazon, around 2012-2015, this would happen frequently enough [0]. I pretty quickly learned the best thing to do was to ignore the conversation and never think about it again rather than try to 'help'.
[0] - too many new products and orgs set up new mailing lists with 5000+ people on it, most of whom had no idea what it was. Growing pains.
At amazon in 2010, someone sent an email to everyone on the "all" mailing list to ask if anyone had seen it.
A reply-all storm ensued, and despite several people asking to stop hitting the reply-all button, it continued for several days.
The management had to chime in and sometimes threatened people with punishment if they continued participating to the reply-all storm.
If you ignored the conversation you may not have seen it, but most reply-all storm ended up with someone saying something the line of "we don't care about your wallet".
Anyway, asking people to stop hitting the reply-all button is far from being the latest reply-all on these kind of things...
>> If you ignored the conversation you may not have seen it, but most reply-all storm ended up with someone saying something the line of "we don't care about your wallet".
Not quite. It started with a meeting invite that was accidentally sent to everyone. The meeting was for the Amazon Wallet team (I think they did something with payments, etc.) for whatever work they were doing at the time.
Most people ignored the meeting invite and just deleted it, but someone hit "Reply All" and said something to the effect of "I know this meeting invite was not for me, but I wanted to make sure that whoever was supposed to get it did not miss the meeting."
From there, it turned into a "Reply All" storm with lots of people replying all with "Please do not reply all".
Others thought it was funny and sent memes. One guy was so bold to promote his indie rock band that was taking off.
The incident is famous and became known as "Wallet", but the name comes from the Amazon Wallet team.
There's a video on Broadcast of Russ Grandinetti emceeing an all hands, and he opens with stats from the Wallet incident. It is hilarious, folks at Amazon should watch it.
Never really happened to me, but Thunderbird has a pretty good feature for this case: "Ignore message thread". I'm sure other mail clients have this feature as well.
If someone is bothered by such a thread, it's really easy to avoid.
It happened to me in a large company I worked with. Someone, probably an admin sent an email to the entire company, literally tens of thousands of people in the "To:" field. Of course, a few of them replied-all, then others replied to tell people to stop replying, etc... The server couldn't follow and mail couldn't be delivered fast enough, prompting even more replies. Email unrelated to the incident took 30 minutes to come through. Admins had to intervene, and the servers were down for about 4 hours, everything related to the incident was deleted server-side, and probably blacklisted too. The client couldn't do much, we didn't even get that many emails (a few dozens at most) since the server couldn't deliver them.
-latest reply all on every reply-all storm.
In my early days at Amazon, around 2012-2015, this would happen frequently enough [0]. I pretty quickly learned the best thing to do was to ignore the conversation and never think about it again rather than try to 'help'.
[0] - too many new products and orgs set up new mailing lists with 5000+ people on it, most of whom had no idea what it was. Growing pains.