Email routing error causes hilarious chaos in 13,000 US Army inboxes

3 years ago 1

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A seemingly minor email routing error caused comedic chaos in US Army inboxes earlier this month, Military.com reports.

The incident — initially mistaken for a “Reply All” mishap — started in the early morning of 2 February 2023, when a captain asked to be removed from the FA57 Voluntary Transfer Incentive Program distribution list.

Mass emails sent to numerous recipients often use the blind copy address line for all subscribed addresses, or the newsletter system sends individual emails to each subscriber.

The reply address for mass mailers usually doesn’t route anywhere. Sometimes, it could route to one of the sender’s inboxes.

However, in this instance, it appeared that the reply option had been set to route messages back to all recipients on the distribution list.

The initial captain’s email landed in about 13,000 inboxes at around 06:30 AM Eastern Time in the US.

In addition to thousands of Army captains and newly-promoted majors, a single chief warrant officer, a US Space Force captain, and a specialist also received the email.

Soon after, hundreds of Army captains also asked to be removed from the list, each of whose emails also ended up in the inboxes of the thousands of list members.

A number had also asked others to stop selecting the “Reply All” option and criticised their peers’ professionalism, unaware they were adding to the problem.

Those who could look on the funnier side of matters started sending memes, poems, sarcastic comments and even attempts to Rickroll their colleagues or jokingly writing a 419 scam email as a desperate prince.

Other captains used the opportunity to provide instructions on how to create email sorting rules in Outlook.

By 19:00 Eastern Time on the same day, 1,000 emails had been sent to the 13,000+ inboxes.

Army officials in other time zones whose workdays started after this time were greeted with the flood of messages upon opening their emails.

The incident culminated in a Microsoft Teams group session where roughly 1,700 officers’ shared useful products, connected professionally and raised morale.

Military.com said one of the lessons to take from this incident was “if you put a bunch of soldiers or officers of the same rank in one room (including generals), they will revert to acting like privates within 15 minutes.”