Replyallcalypse (Reply All + Apocalypse)
The “Replyallcalypse” (Reply All + Apocalypse) occurred in November 2012 when New York University sophomore Max Wiseltier meant to forward an NYU Bursar’s office message to his mother and he hit “Reply All.” The email message was also sent to all 39,979 NYU students.
David Vogelsang of the NYU Student Resource Center took the blame for the “Replyallcalypse,” stating that he should have used Email Direct instead if the older Lryis email system.
NYU Local
Replyallcalypse 2012: NYU Local Explains Why Your Inbox Was Blowing Up Last Night [UPDATED]
By Kelly Weill on November 27th, 2012
39,979 students received a message from the Bursar’s Office. All 39,979 were on NYU’s “src-contacts” mailing list.
39,979 students were about to meet Max Wiseltier.
“I was trying to forward the message to my mom, to get her input on the paperless tax forms,” Max Wiseltier, sophomore, explained later, “but all of NYU was cc’ed accidentally.”
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UPDATE: We’ve received a comment from David Vogelsang of the NYU Student Resource Center, who says he is behind the listserv mix-up. The accounts on the list have now been deleted. “And yes, you are absolutely correct that I should have used Email Direct instead of Lyris,” Vogelsang wrote. This does, it seems, mark the end of Replyallcalypse:
Time magazine
Education
40,000 NYU Students Spammed in ‘Replyallcalypse’
By Sonia van Gilder Cooke
Nov. 28, 2012
What would you write if you could send a note to 40,000 people? This week students at New York University had the chance to do just that, after an NYU sophomore accidentally discovered a bug in a school Listserv system that allowed anyone to ‘reply all’ to a generic university-wide email.
It all went down on Monday evening, when a message from the NYU Bursar’s office about IRS forms landed in some 40,000 students’ inboxes, according to Gawker. Sophomore Max Wiseltier did the natural thing and forwarded it straight to his mom with the question, “do you want me to do this?” Except he had accidentally clicked “reply all” instead of ‘forward’. He then fired off another “reply all” message saying “SORRY!!!!!!” but it didn’t matter. Pandora’s mailbox was already wide open, and, in Gawker’s words, full of college students “simultaneously realizing their power to be obnoxious.”
The Telegraph (UK)
Replyallcalypse: 40,000 people spammed in NYU email farce
It is the nightmare that virtually all email users dread: accidentally hitting “Reply All”.
Our Foreign Staff
7:23AM GMT 29 Nov 2012
This week, one student at New York University took the all-too-simple error to the next level, when he inadvertently discovered a bug in the school email system that allowed anyone to “reply all” to a generic university email, bombarding nearly 40,000 people with his answer.
The resulting 24-hour flurry of emails - later dubbed by university officials as “replyallcalypse” - saw every NYU student’s inbox quickly fill with replies ranging from the jokes (“does anyone have a pencil I can borrow?”) to pleas for the mass emails to end (“SHUT THE F*** UP PLEASE”).
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David Vogelsang, head of the NYU Student Resource Center, took responsibility for the gaffe. In a statement to local media, he wrote: “I was assisting the Bursar with an email message and in populating one of the SRC Listserves did not realize the list I was using was one that allowed for responses and thus the ‘replyallcalypse’… I take full responsibility for this blunder and offer my sincere apologies for the frustrating situation that was created.”