A perfect storm - email variety

Holy SH&& - someone accidentally hit reply-all to an email at the US State Department and the load crashed their system. From The Associated Press:

Reply-all e-mail storm hits State
Many "reply all" fiascos result in mere embarrassment, but American diplomats have been told they may be punished for sending mass responses after an e-mail storm nearly knocked out one of the State Department's main electronic communications systems.

A cable sent last week to all employees at the department's Washington headquarters and overseas missions warns of unspecified "disciplinary actions" for using the "reply to all" function on e-mail with large distribution lists.

The cable, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, was prompted by a major interruption in departmental e-mail caused by numerous diplomats hitting "reply all" to an errant message inadvertently addressed and copied to several thousand recipients.

A bit more:

Most demanded to be removed from the list while others used 'reply all' to tell their co-workers, in often less than diplomatic language, to stop responding to the entire group, the officials said.

Some then compounded the problem by trying to recall their initial replies, which generated another round of messages to the group, they said.

Going to be some filtering being written sometime soon -- also, the best thing to do in a situation like this is to walk out for a coffee and come back in 30 minutes when it hopefully has settled down. When I worked for MSFT, someone's machine got an email spam trojan and the whole campus was hit pretty hard as people would get these emails that came from groups they recognized or were familiar with. Slashdot has more on the story.