PEBKAC of the highest order

You might have heard of mailbombs and DDOS attacks such as the one recently suffered by the Telegraph , but have you ever heard of a company having their mail server fall over due to employee stupidity?

Yesterday morning in the early hours, the 'Role cleansing team' emailed every employee to check if we still needed access to certain systems- one email per system. Sensible people like myself clicked 'reply' and gave the answer. Super. Then some less clever people hit 'reply to all'. This is not normally a problem except.....the role cleansing team hadn't used the BCC field for their distribution lists. They'd used the 'To' field. So EVERYBODY got the reply. Then some people (like myself) got a little annoyed, and started (unlike myself) sending out emails going 'don't use reply to all'. Then started getting more annoyed as the deluge increased as people started logging in for 9am, and there were 30 emails in 2 minutes in each inbox. And started sending pissy emails slagging people off for being stupid -neatly missing the point that each person logging in would be starting from the top of their inbox so wouldnt be ready the pissy emails yet, so all that was doing was clogging up the system.

I was getting rather shrill by this point(longer-standing colleagues call this 'going hypersonic' and remove sharp objects from my immediate vicinity when this happens). Replied to a couple of people who thought themselves funny by replying to all saying 'Okay' to the messages saying 'don't reply to all', pointing out it may have been funny the first time but originality was what counted.

So this is 9.15, and I have 67 pointless messages.

So do the other few thousand UK employees.And the offshore employees. I'm spluttering and waving my arms about and emailing the role cleansing team and the IT service desk about blocking the mails.

Then someone from a northern office sends out a picture of a circus ringmaster with a banner saying "The best show on earth" with our company name added below.

I laugh.

Then it gets silly. More emails pour in by the second- genuine responses to the original email, threats and pleading from the frustrated/confused about a possible virus, jokes, car adverts, panicky messages from offshore team managers as their teams could no longer access Lotus Notes, pictures of the Grand Canyon, invites to the pub and on and on and Ariston.

By now the entire floor is abuzz with comments and yelps from late arrivals trying to open their inbox. No chance of doing any sensible work. I reply to an email by someone from Bangalore enquiring after the weather, a Liverpudlian complimenting her choice of Iron Maiden album cover and another person in Bishopbriggs advising him to shut down Notes and go for a coffee.

By 9.40 we were up to over 200 emails.

Servicedesk managed to stop it. Our CIO posted a sheepish apology in his intranet blog, explaining what had happened and promising that distribution lists would be placed in the correct field in future, and that email training would be rolled out to explain the difference between 'reply' and 'reply to all'.

For a company that introduced 'Pay as you drive' telematics and has a digital flood map of the UK that accurately plots risk to within a few feet, it was a pretty poor performance.

And now it's time for the first in an occasional series I'd like to call 'Song lyrics I have stuck in my brain'. Today, it's the final line from the Hungarian Eurovision entry (I love high camp, I'll blog about this in future) 'except an evanescent, unsubstantial blues'