"Free bananas in the NHS staff kitchen!!!"

November 14, 2016 2:53 PM

Today, someone or something sent a "test" email to NHS staff. Unfortunately to rather a lot of NHS staff - between 850,000 and 1.2 million. A few of whom sent reply-all responses. Chaos ensued, though it is unclear whether bananas were involved.
posted by Wordshore (67 comments total)

I enjoyed this choice of words from the 'reply-all responses' link:

"It's driving me bananas," one doctor - who asked not to be identified - told the BBC.

posted by Pink Frost at 2:57 PM on November 14, 2016 [9 favorites]

Why do people feel compelled to reply? Are there really people so lonely and underworked that this merits their attention?
posted by GuyZero at 2:58 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

And I think the first time I saw this happen was around 1993 at Microsoft. Hardly the last time though. And yet I still don't understand why people don't just delete the email and move on.
posted by GuyZero at 2:59 PM on November 14, 2016 [6 favorites]

As I always say when this happens at work, this is why they invented BCC:.
posted by hwestiii at 3:01 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

GuyZero: "Why do people feel compelled to reply? Are there really people so lonely and underworked that this merits their attention?"

i agree
posted by boo_radley at 3:03 PM on November 14, 2016 [136 favorites]

I remember reading about this tale from years back, and I was delighted/shocked/disgusted when the exact thing happened at my company last year. It was some innocuous email related to one particular district that went global instead, and fully captured the experience including people angrily shouting DO NOT HIT REPLY ALL before sending the message TO ALL and random people around the world desperately begging to be taken off the email list. It went on for nearly two weeks before finally subsiding. To this day I am still amused/appalled that it's actually a thing that really happens and there's still no way to stop it once it starts.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 3:05 PM on November 14, 2016 [10 favorites]

Hahahah. Mrs garius (*becca*) works in the NHS so has been dealing with this all day.

We both wondered if it would get a mention here (with a bananas reference).
posted by garius at 3:07 PM on November 14, 2016 [7 favorites]

It wasn't to all NHS staff, only those using nhs.net email addresses. They're the secure emails you can send confidential information over. In many trusts staff might just use their trust's email (ending nhs.uk). These are insecure and not to be used for patient information. They also don't share an England-wide address book.

It didn't affect my email and the first I heard of it is through reading news websites this evening.
posted by Emma May Smith at 3:07 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

1. You should never be allowed to directly send a mail to that many people.

2. They need to nuke reply-all from orbit.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 3:15 PM on November 14, 2016 [6 favorites]

Previously.
posted by effbot at 3:16 PM on November 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

BEDLAM DL3 - Me too!
posted by deezil at 3:26 PM on November 14, 2016

For a joke, fwd this image, unsolicited, to your biggest mailing list.
posted by lalochezia at 3:27 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Something similar happened recently at my company when a spammy email was sent to hundreds of people. Although it was a bit annoying to keep having to delete the deluge of incoming "reply all" emails of people replying stupidly, I had a big laugh when emails from "helpful" people who Replied All with a modified Subject line adding "STOP USING REPLY ALL, JUST DELETE THE MESSAGE" got their own many, many replies with "why am I getting this" and "please unsubscribe me from this email list"! Idiots gonna idiot...
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:29 PM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

In the aftermath of the Berkeley Incident, survivors held a picnic (because Berkeley).
posted by rtha at 3:30 PM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

Every time this comes up people blame the email users. It's not their fault. It's the email systems' fault. It should be not be possible to accidentally send an email to 1000s+ of people. Under any circumstance, it should require a deliberate act.
posted by Nelson at 3:33 PM on November 14, 2016 [18 favorites]

Why am I seeing this thread?
posted by ckape at 3:41 PM on November 14, 2016 [25 favorites]

I've always marveled at the conventions of email. Its viewing fields are strictly and extremely horizontal/lateral. If my "list" of recipients is lengthy, I am forced to view them through something akin a tank's window, ya know?
posted by lazycomputerkids at 3:42 PM on November 14, 2016 [8 favorites]

For a joke, fwd this image, unsolicited, to your biggest mailing list.

Where are the graphs for the "what does dotted line B represent?" emails and the "the orange line isn't in the legend. Please clarify." emails?
posted by nubs at 3:44 PM on November 14, 2016 [19 favorites]

>Why am I seeing this thread?
>>Stop it, you're posting where everyone can see
>>>Unsubscribe
>OMG, stop hitting reply-all
>>How dumb are you people hitting reply-all, I'd never be so stupid

why am I even posting this
posted by mrgoat at 4:00 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

>>Why am I seeing this thread?
>>>Stop it, you're posting where everyone can see
>>>>Unsubscribe
>>OMG, stop hitting reply-all
>>>How dumb are you people hitting reply-all, I'd never be so stupid
>
>why am I even posting this

unsubscribe
posted by Hamusutaa at 4:03 PM on November 14, 2016 [9 favorites]

GuyZero: "Why do people feel compelled to reply? Are there really people so lonely and underworked that this merits their attention?"

i agree

This.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:08 PM on November 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

I always love when someone obscure, who doesn't use email frequently, (generally someone deep in supply chain) needs to check on the status of an order in a different part of the world. They find a group that looks like it deals with the order in the continent and maybe something to do with sales and Blammo - suddenly the entire building is reading and is stuck on ensuring a specific order or purchase order is fulfilled / submitted to the right person. I routinely find myself wanting to know the end of the general cliffhanger.
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:14 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

We had something like this happen at my scientific agency a couple of weeks ago. It was hilarious!
posted by wintermind at 4:17 PM on November 14, 2016

I think Jolene Millman may be to blame
posted by noneuclidean at 4:18 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

I have to admit I alternated between a pained "oooooooh" and hysterical laughter at the tweet pictured in this article:

Special shout out to the #nhsmail email user who explained these are going to the whole NHS then including a read receipt request #fail

I mean... oh god...
posted by prismatic7 at 4:24 PM on November 14, 2016 [10 favorites]

The bank next to my old job got robbed, which led to the CFO emailing everyone with CCTV pictures, CCing some FBI agent, with an admonishment not to subject the FBI to people replying-all. That was right around the time someone had the clever idea of restricting who could email the all alias.
posted by hoyland at 4:28 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

I have, on more than one occasion, Replied-All with PLEASE STOP REPLYING ALL just to be an asshole.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by Cookiebastard at 4:28 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

That's why we can't have nice things.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:31 PM on November 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

I liked it better when it was the West Wing's Margaret emailing about the calorie count in raisin muffins.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 4:34 PM on November 14, 2016 [7 favorites]

Where are the graphs for the "what does dotted line B represent?" emails and the "the orange line isn't in the legend. Please clarify." emails?
Surely you mean "please advise".
posted by Hal Mumkin at 4:57 PM on November 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

Clickbait inversion?
posted by lazycomputerkids at 4:58 PM on November 14, 2016

Reply Allpocalypse!
posted by clew at 5:05 PM on November 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

For those of us who are idiots, what is the NHS? National Honor Society? National Health Service? National Homeland Security?
posted by yoga at 5:30 PM on November 14, 2016

"Reply All" and "Send All" should be two-stage processes.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:31 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Are there really people so lonely and underworked that this merits their attention?

Civil servants? More likely they are just miserable gits like pretty much everyone I have to work with here and also, me.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:34 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

When this happened in college, since my school was on Google apps some kind soul replied-all to tell everyone that pressing "m" would mute the thread for them. This was true, but it caused a whole mess of people to reply-all with just the letter "m" in the message body.
posted by gracenote at 5:50 PM on November 14, 2016 [12 favorites]

"Reply All" and "Send All" should be two-stage processes.

People would just figure out how to speed finger through them, like everything else.
posted by hearthpig at 6:00 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

yoga: NHS is the National Health Service.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:13 PM on November 14, 2016

We had an interesting case of this at the hospital where I work inside of our electronic health record. Refill request came in from a patient and instead of sending it to the right provider the staff entered something like "c Jane Smith" and the system sent the message to every user in the same class as Jane Smith, which was roughly 7,000 people.

The c functionality was quickly turned off.
posted by MadMadam at 6:15 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

>>Why am I seeing this thread?
>>>Stop it, you're posting where everyone can see
>>>>Unsubscribe
>>OMG, stop hitting reply-all
>>>How dumb are you people hitting reply-all, I'd never be so stupid
>
>why am I even posting this
>>FWD>>>FWD>>>FWD
>>The government can read all these emails

Scary! That's why I got Norton!!!!
-Love, Mom
posted by littlesq at 6:35 PM on November 14, 2016 [12 favorites]

This can't really happen where I work, because most people are burning through their inboxes each morning with an itchy delete finger. "Do I care about this? No. Bam" accounts for 90% of everything. Not enough critical mass of people who even look at it long enough to reply.

Adding the read receipt though... that's brilliant. I might do that on purpose.
posted by ctmf at 8:02 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

So... who ate all the bananas?
posted by azpenguin at 8:07 PM on November 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

From the article: National Health Service Digital has tried to blame IT outsourcer Accenture

Say no more. Accenture. I'll... say no more about what I think of Accenture.
posted by ctmf at 8:11 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Ah, that 'Love, Mom' comment just reminded me something.

A kid I went to college with used to call his mom pretty regularly - not unusual. Over time though, he called less, and so his mom would call him in a panic at an almost increased frequency. Like most kids he stopped, because - hey - she's calling him now.

This was '94/'95... and email for students was sort of a newer thing, and parents were almost decidedly not on email. So, lo and behold, we found out his mother was on email, when she spam mailed every kid on the floor (and the RAs and RDs) to have him call his mother. Basically, his mom - in a super mom 'Where's my son? Is he ok? Is he on the drugs?' moment used a rough list of names her son had said and figured out all our email addresses and extended her weekly panic from just subjected to him to a dorm floor running gag... Basically, he couldn't go to the dining hall, to the bathroom, to class, wherever - without someone from the floor saying, "Have you called your mom yet?".

So yeah, it wasn't a reply all spam, but there was cringe worthy message persistence long before bad email reply alls...
posted by Nanukthedog at 8:12 PM on November 14, 2016 [28 favorites]

Burma Shave.
posted by vrakatar at 8:25 PM on November 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wikipedia's article on email storm notes that this problem dates back to at least 1997, almost 2 decades! While the slow death of an open and federated Internet is quite problematic, the closed, unfederated, commercial product Slack has supplanted the IRC in many communities, and for good reason.
posted by fragmede at 8:44 PM on November 14, 2016

Please remove me from this thread.
posted by dgeiser13 at 9:30 PM on November 14, 2016

So then I take it the Syncapatico shop now, too?
posted by bunbury at 10:10 PM on November 14, 2016

NHS is the fifth biggest employer of the world, only beaten by the US and China militaries, Walmart, and McDonald's, and then only if you count McDonald's franchises together. Even if nothing went out to literally all employees, this may give you a sense of the scale of what's happened.
posted by water under the bridge at 10:15 PM on November 14, 2016 [12 favorites]

Why do people feel compelled to reply? Are there really people so lonely and underworked that this merits their attention?

Judging from the replies it's a few different categories:
- officiousness/pedantry - "I have this email and I don't understand why so I'll respond because I don't want to perceived as not having responded to an email" (these people clearly don't have that much to do).
-Genuinely thinking that they and they alone are on a list they shouldn't be on and failing to understand that reply all is not the best way to respond
-Frustration mixed with a complete lack of self-awareness - my inbox is full of 100s of emails and I'm annoyed so I will add to the problem by replying all to complain that people have replied all

In fairness though it's gone to hundreds of thousands of people and only a few hundred have been daft enough to reply.

I've been getting a small amount of satisfaction from the officious idiots who have read receipts turned on for all emails - I find this enormously irritating and self important but the thought them have to deal with hundreds of thousands of read receipts gives me a small hope that maybe they will realise they don't need to know whether someone has read their every trivial utterance.

I have had to sit on my hands not to send out an email offering free bananas.
posted by *becca* at 2:00 AM on November 15, 2016 [10 favorites]

This happened a few weeks ago at the college I'm studying at part-time. It was an amusing mixture of "you do know this is going to EVERYONE right" and "this is really tiresome pls stop" and "how do I stop this???1??" but my favourite bit was the little baby boy trolls who were sending risqué pictures (of, like, Gorillas with their bits showing because they r so bad) and I was watching people react all "I DO NOT WANT TO SEE THIS YOU GUYS ARE IN SO MUCH TROUBLE" and I really wanted to reply "Fuck that, 4chan would eat these guys for breakfast, they probably haven't even heard of goatse lol" and then I remembered I'm 40 so I just sadly hit delete and went about my day.
posted by billiebee at 2:02 AM on November 15, 2016 [8 favorites]

It wasn't to all NHS staff, only those using nhs.net email addresses. They're the secure emails you can send confidential information over. In many trusts staff might just use their trust's email (ending nhs.uk). These are insecure and not to be used for patient information

Correction. Trust email can and should be used for patient information while emailing within that trust. NHS email must be used for emailing to different trusts - and must be used at both ends. But many trusts and most sensible ones just use nhs net. (Juggling accounts this way is irritating but necessary and I have multiple accounts because of it)
posted by Francis at 2:08 AM on November 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

It would have been better to use subdomains for trusts and CCGs and other NHS organisations (eg. [e-mail]) rather than sticking everyone under one domain, but given the organisation's record on IT projects I guess it's a miracle it works at all.

The advantage of the current system is you get to keep your email address when you move workplaces though. And common names are always a problem. I used to share an office with someone who had the same name (forename and surname) as two other people who worked in the same hospital. He was pretty used to redirecting emails and phone calls to his namesakes.
posted by *becca* at 3:10 AM on November 15, 2016

"It's driving me bananas," one doctor - who asked not to be identified - told the BBC.

I see what you did there, Doc.
posted by Rock Steady at 5:24 AM on November 15, 2016

It's not the same thing but:

A decade or so back, I accidentally got added to a mailing list of some uber-cool, jet setting acquaintances, like 30 of them, who seemed to be always planning skiing trips and renting yachts. As exciting as this might seem, I didn't know any of them and didn't seem to be getting invited on said skiing trips or yachts, so I sent an email saying ha ha for some reason you included me on this list, please remove me.
They went apeshit, accused me of 'hacking' their list, shrilly demanding I remove myself. I patiently explained that I couldn't do anything of the sort, that they were emailing me, that's not how email works, etc.
After a few days, they must have found some friend of a brother's friend who explained how email actually works, and the mails stopped.
I'm not saying everybody should able to write their own SMTP server, but at least understanding the basic idea of what email is and how it works should be a requirement.
posted by signal at 6:34 AM on November 15, 2016 [8 favorites]

Jessamyn and other digital literacy educators, I'm wondering, do you do basic lessons on etiquette things like this? Because it seems to me we could actually go a ways towards nipping Eternal September problems in the bud by just exposing people to some of the basic scenarios we all went through at some point in the past (don't reply all, don't feed the trolls, there's nothing stopping anyone from registering whitehouse.com and using it as a porn site, it's trivial to take images from a website or scrape a site's look and feel, etc etc etc.) I keep trying to convince educators this is what ed tech should consist of, but as per the post a few days ago from Audrey Watters's blog, you can't stop ed tech from losing all sense and believing that iPads or virtual worlds or handhelds are the One True Future of digital literacy...
posted by gusandrews at 8:22 AM on November 15, 2016

Related story brought to you by the New York Times internal email system
posted by gkhan at 8:57 AM on November 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

(context)
posted by gkhan at 8:58 AM on November 15, 2016

In the late 90s, our CEO sent out a "state of the business" type email and did not use BCC. One angry person replied to all about their frustration with their job and many others replied to the angry person and all of us as well. The CEO sent out a followup message thanking everyone for their input and begging them to stop. I am pretty sure it was the angry person's last day, whether they wanted it to be or not.
posted by soelo at 10:45 AM on November 15, 2016

I am pretty sure it was the angry person's last day, whether they wanted it to be or not.

As we say at work, you can send any email you want on your last day.
posted by GuyZero at 10:58 AM on November 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

To be fair to the people who replied: CroydonPractices was the only name in the to: field, and some people's jobs might involve getting mailed out in lists like that. Mine has in the past. And by the time I logged on, the replies to the email were coming in at least 5 minutes apart, so you wouldn't have seen any replies before replying to the list with a polite WTF.

But if The Register's right, and it was a malformed distribution list being converted to email all, then the blame is on Accenture and Microsoft.
posted by ambrosen at 11:48 AM on November 15, 2016 [3 favorites]

The disappointing part of this is that the unfortunate woman who started the chain has been utterly vilified by the UK gutter press and all over Twitter.
She does not work for Accenture and would have had no more idea that 'CroydonPractices' would go to everyone than the other 160+ people who replied all.

I think a sensible estimate is that this event resulted in approximately 140,000,000 extra emails being sent which is equivalent to around 2 weeks of normal traffic for NHSmail. It could have been much much worse, but has still set the world record for the largest email storm so far.
posted by Lanark at 12:34 PM on November 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

"It looks like you're writing an email to the entire NHS"
posted by iotic at 5:19 PM on November 15, 2016 [9 favorites]

I've always found these hilarious. At my last company (~80k employees worldwide) it happened to me at least three times, and every time I'd get an initial trickle of reply-all "Please remove me from this list"s, maybe one or two every five minutes, and I'd think to myself "oooh, here we go." Then the deluge of five or six per minute would start pouring in, and you could actually track when people at the various sites were arriving at work, logging in, and sending their reply alls. It would start in the US and Mexico, and then Japan and China would start, the India followed by Eastern Europe....the frenzy went around the world at least two or three times the first time this happened.

It's pretty easy to just set up an Outlook rule to move the messages straight to the trash, but I always found it hilarious to set up a folder to collect and count how many got sent. It was easily several thousand emails each time.
posted by Existential Dread at 9:34 PM on November 15, 2016 [2 favorites]

iotic: brilliant.
posted by persona au gratin at 2:43 AM on November 16, 2016

Since we use Outlook here at work, the one big thing that no one seems to ever do is force the option to accept meeting requests without sending an email reply to the organizer. So I always wonder what the poor admins do when they email, say, the whole company for an all-employee meeting and get thousands of "Yes, I'm attending", "No, I'm not attending" emails.

Although the best (worst?) example of abusing reply-all I've witnessed here was when a fairly standard "Congratulations to so-and-so on their promotion!" email was sent out to my division. Some fairly unhappy guy in another department accidentally replied to the entire list complaining about the promotion and how it was indicative of everything wrong with the company, etc. I sometimes wonder if he's still around.
posted by backseatpilot at 6:58 AM on November 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

This happens quite frequently at my workplace; maybe every 6 months or so. There are ~20,000 people with emails @companyname.com. Not all of these reply-all disasters are to the entire company, but anything that's accidently reply-all'd to more than a couple thousand always without fail gets a collection of "dude - wtf", and joke "unsubscribe" and sincere "please unsubscribe me" from some clueless nitwits. However, it's now a running joke among anyone who's been around for more than a few of these that eventually a certain member of our board with a unique sense of humor will also reply-all with a meme or other funny graphic that usually subtly implies that the next person who replies should be sincerely worried about their job security.

It's actually kinda awesome, and I've come to love those threads...
posted by cgg at 11:13 AM on November 20, 2016