[blensor]

The real problem was that so many people felt the urge to reply to that PR making it so much worse than a single ping.

I can live with the random message that has nothing to do with me, but having to delete an endless stream of messages because so many people felt the need to reply already knowing that it would go out to everyone is really annoying

[janoc]

I happened to be hit by the Github incident. The worst is not the guy who made the mistake (happens) but the fools who hit Reply-All to first complain about spam and then to yell at each other to stop hitting Reply-All, making the problem exponentially worse ... facepalm

Oh and one has even posted a "goatse" image there ...

[richardw]

Happened in my wife’s company of around 40k people. Mail to all, replies to stop replying, many hours to stop the firestorm. Then next timezone 8 hours out started replying. I don’t know why they didn’t just kill permissions to the mailing list.

[cycomanic]

Similar thing happened at uni when I was doing a PhD.

The graduate office had some sort of mailing list which included all PhD students (or maybe even graduate students). There was maybe one mail a year to this list.

At some point someone replied to the list (don't ask why the allowed everyone to post), they want to be unsubscribe, trigger a torrent of emails of people wanting to unsubscribe, people telling people to use the link on the email, people asking why they get this email, others telling everyone to stop replying (the irony). It was a study of human psychology.

The whole thing lasted a week, I think in the end somebody was competent enough to restrict who could write to the list or maybe they just nuked the list.

[_Microft]

Are you familiar with this story of an email storm at Microsoft already?

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/me...

[spockz]

Outlook has this amazing feature to ignore email threads: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ignore-all-email-...

[monkpit]

They also have Reply Storm Protection in Exchange now:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/re...

[anamexis]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm

[bennyp101]

A few years ago someone managed to email the whole of the NHS with a test email ... on a Monday morning... [1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/nhs-e...

[fnordpiglet]

I’ve seen this happen in some context at least once every five years throughout the 30 years of my career. The absolute best ones cause large scale incidents due to the volume of the messages. I always looked at it as a random celebration that brings all the trolls and introduces them to the idiots.

[johnnyanmac]

It's the "law" of numbers. 400k pings, even if only 1% clicked on the repo, and maybe 10% of them commented: that's 400 comments to make. Even on internal repos I've never seen productive discussion really happen past 50 or so comments.

And then the news broke out and that drove even more than 1% to check out the drama. Maybe even had some people sign up for Epic just to check it out.

[mumblemumble]

It wasn't even that many people. Maybe (and generously, I think) 100 commenters out of ~400,000 people who got notified? That's 0.025%.

[zenexer]

All of those 400k people were notified because the author tagged a group containing 400k people. For every comment, 400k emails went out.

I never commented, but I received an email for every comment in that issue. The email queue was so backed up that I was receiving emails for quite some time after the issue was closed.

[blensor]

And some troll did the same thing with another pull request about 2 hours ago.

[umanwizard]

The worst is that it becomes clear eventually that people are responding just to troll.

The casual vandalism of hundreds of thousands of people’s time and attention is absolutely mind-boggling to me. I saw similar things at large (50k+ employees) companies when some reply-all chain got started — people who clearly knew better, replying just for the lulz.

If it were up to me, I would have fired them immediately. Nobody has the right to conscript other people into their personal sense of humor.

[sph]

I wouldn't go that far.

It's annoying to get useless email, but 95% of the non-spam email I receive everyday is useless crap: T&C changes, some company newsletter that somehow I never unsubscribed to, other notifications deemed so important I cannot unsubscribe to, a GitHub thread I subscribed to years ago and now has a very active discussion.

It's not like every single person received 400k emails in one go, it's 400k people receiving those 10 or 20 messages from the same thread over an hour. Annoying, waste of time, but not unheard of.

[umanwizard]

The attitude annoys me more than the actual effect.

I’d also fire someone who “trolled” the company by spraying graffiti on the side of the building. Trivial to remove or even ignore, yes, but the unprofessional and juvenile mindset, taking pleasure in annoying everyone else, is enraging all by itself even if no practical harm was done.

[sph]

This is not an Epic employee that trolled the company.

This is random people on the Internet that probably didn't even know they were part of that notification group, as explained elsewhere in this thread, and then joked around a little longer than they should have. It might not been immediately clear to some that each of their responses was to be sent to all 400k.

Not at all the same crime as you paint it to be. In any case, there is no one that's fireable here, so no need to try looking for some kind of righteous justice here.

[mxkopy]

I don't think it's trolling, it's just having a lighthearted moment in an unexpected situation. You can't blame individuals for doing what they're supposed to do, i.e. replying to emails; at that point it's the moderators' jobs to kill mailing permissions or something.

>the unprofessional and juvenile mindset, taking pleasure in annoying everyone else, is enraging all by itself even if no practical harm was done.

Working at your company sounds hellish.

[fnordpiglet]

You’ve obviously never removed graffiti.

[zenexer]

People want GitHub to fix their system. Epic also has annoying process whereby you have to join their GitHub organization to access certain free tools, which is why they have a GitHub group with 400k people in the first place.

Edit: What great timing—someone just opened a new issue with the same tag. This needs to be fixed on GitHub’s end.

[rightbyte]

> If it were up to me, I would have fired them immediately.

That sounds a bit harsh. As a user of FOSS mailing lists I don't even think it is strange to send a mail to everyone.

It is a process issue where mailing lists are used for one way coms but still are writable for all.

[UncleEntity]

> If it were up to me, I would have fired them immediately. Nobody has the right to conscript other people into their personal sense of humor.

I’d just fire everyone with a sense of humor, that’ll show them.

I’ve heard some people spend whole minutes setting up a joke for the punchline. How many billions of dollars does that cost the economy each year one has to wonder.

Outright theft of wages if you ask me!

[umanwizard]

Intentionally annoying other people isn’t comparable to telling jokes.

[NullPrefix]

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