The Reply-Allpocalypse: Email as a Weapon of Mass Distraction
The Reply-Allpocalypse: Email as a Weapon of Mass Distraction
Use the Bcc: field as a best practice to prevent email storms
Once upon a time, there was an organization named Company McCorporateface, Inc. with 25,000 employees. This is the story of a well-intentioned Company employee who unleashed a cascade of human stupidity. The cataclysm is indelibly remembered in Company lore as the “Reply-Allpocalypse.”
The Email Storm of the Century
It began on a bright and sunny Tuesday morning:
To: All-Employee-Mailing-List
Subject: Company McCorporateface Holiday Party!
The instigator sowed the seeds of electronic doom by using the “To:” field instead of the “Bcc:” field. Perhaps this employee didn’t understand the functionality of the Bcc: field. Or, maybe the employee used the To: field out of habit. It was an honest mistake; this message of goodwill was intended for all Company employees, so it logically follows that the email should be addressed directly to its recipients.
The email storm clouds began gathering as soon as the first email landed in the inboxes of all 25,000 Company employees. Within fifteen minutes, the first reply-all read:
“Sorry, I’ll be out of town that week. Wish I could be there!”
This triggered a reply-all from another Company employee, who also declined the invitation with regrets. A third employee jumped on the bandwagon to reply-all, wishing the non-attendees a Merry Christmas. A fourth employee, in a grandiose display of virtue-signaling, replied-all that “Merry Christmas” should be revised to “Happy Holidays” because the latter phrase is more politically correct than the former.
By this point, only four people had sent messages, but 100,000 emails had been exchanged through Company McCorporateface, Inc.’s computer servers. A bright and sunny Tuesday morning had devolved into a dreary downpour of emails. The damage continued with a fifth reply-all:
“Please remove me from this mailing list, thanks.”
Which caused three other employees to reply-all with “me too”, “unsubscribe me”, and “stop messaging me, please.” A ninth employee, trying to stanch the hemorrhage of digital blood from the electronic aether, replied-all with:
“Please stop replying-all. This is disruptive to everyone.”
Which triggered two reply-alls from other Company employees repeating the sentiment. The attempts were noble in intent, but futile in effect. Apparently, none of them detected the hypocrisy in replying-all to tell others to stop replying-all.
By this point, over a quarter-million emails had been sent. No one could concentrate on actual work because of the electronic flash flood, and Company McCorporateface leadership began to grasp the extent of the problem. The executives knew they had to act quickly, but the CEO was traveling and the Chief Technology Officer was out sick. The CTO’s deputy was unsure if he had the authority to shut down the email thread, and placed several frantic calls to Board members. It took some time to find a Board member who wasn’t paralyzed with corporate cancer to provide guidance.
In the meantime, a 12th employee replied-all with a single image, summarizing everyone’s mood:
To which two other employees replied-all with an “lol” and a snarky comment.
Then, a Company employee who was bored, malicious, or just plain stupid entered the fray. He kicked the hornet’s nest with an incendiary meme about the political-correctness of wishing “Merry Christmas” to infidels. This elicited five angry reply-alls from other Company employees before the CTO’s deputy shut down the email thread and deleted everything from 25,000 inboxes.
Thus ended Company McCorporateface, Inc.’s Reply-Allpocalypse.
The Extent of the Damage
As the floodwaters receded, Company leadership evaluated the wreckage. It wasn’t pretty.
The original message, which contained an image (a Christmas tree for holiday cheer), was 100 kilobytes in size. From there, each reply-all email grew in size because its message history contained a copy of the reply-alls that came before it. During this reply-allpocalypse, 20 senders generated half a million emails among themselves, totaling 187 gigabytes of email traffic. To put this in perspective:
187 gigabytes is enough to stream all three Lord of the Rings, Extended Edition movies, in high-definition, 18 times in a row. The ordeal would last 8 days.
Then, there’s productivity loss. All 25,000 employees were distracted for the entire morning as the drama unfolded. It’s impossible to measure the productivity loss from employees chatting amongst themselves (without replying-all) via text messages, Microsoft Teams, Slack, or over the cubicle walls. A conservative estimate is a million dollars in wasted salary and benefits1.
Finally, there’s the loss in goodwill. The reply-allpocalypse created emotional debris that tainted employee morale. To add insult to injury, Company McCorporateface’s blunder was featured in the local newspaper a few days later. The article’s comment section overflowed with vitriol and schadenfreude, lambasting Company leadership for their perceived sluggishness in reacting to the fiasco.
The Moral of the Story
Thou shalt use the bcc: field to contact large groups of people.
And thus, the leadership of Company McCorporateface, Inc. learned to:
Implement a policy mandating the use of the bcc: field when the list of recipients is larger than a dozen recipients
Restrict employee access to large email lists
Empower the CTO (or interim CTO) to unilaterally shut down a Reply-Allpocalypse without waiting for orders
Hanlon’s Razor applies here. Most employees acted out of goodwill or ignorance, not malice (except for employee #15, who faced disciplinary action). In Leadership Land, you must proactively defend against the unintended consequences that lurk beneath the Desert of Good Intentions. Encourage your employees to use the bcc: field to protect them from themselves.
From this Indeed.com article, the average salary of full-time workers in the United States is $53,924 as of June 30, 2022. If we assume 2,080 hours is the annual equivalent of full-time work:
(25,000 employees × 2 hours average productivity loss per employee × $53,924 average annual salary) ÷ 2080 annual hours worked = $1,296,250 in lost productivity from salary alone