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One Simple E-Mail Ended With Complete Worldwide Chaos Inside The BP Corporation

If you are an employee in a corporation, most notably a worldwide corporation, then you are most likely required to send out e-mails to different departments. That’s what happened at BP, where an employee wrote an e-mail to a Mr. “Shahid” where he mentioned that an employee by the name of “Anant Prakash” was removed from the OMS Navigation Users distribution list. However, the mail did not reach only the employees in question, but the whole worldwide group of employees.

Having sent an e-mail to different users than required (in this case all BP employees), the next reasonable step was to send another e-mail in reply, notifying upon the mistake. Something like “Please disregard the previous e-mail” or “Kindly ignore the e-mail” are just a few examples that follow such an error. However, before he was able to rectify his mistake, replies were rolling in.

It started off with e-mails such as “I have no idea who this is and can you remove me from this email,” or “Similarly I think I was added to the distribution in error”. From here, others have tried to contain the thread with messages such as “OK we have all been added in error and the guy who sent the original email has already recognised his mistake!”. Alas, that did not stop the spark generated.

Soon after, all employees from different time zones were starting to wake up or take an interest in this spamming thread, some even sending replies such as “Keep me in the loop please, I love this madness! :)”. It is not uncommon for people to be amused by such mistakes, however there were other more monotonous employees who did not find it so amusing thinking it will make a difference by expressing their frustration with capital letters and hitting the ‘Reply All’ button. A glimpse of the thread can be seen below:

“CAN YOU ALL STOP SELECTING ‘REPLY ALL’ …… just reply to Patsy.”

“PLEASE TAKE ME OFF ALL THESE REDICULOUS REPLIES!”

“CAN YOU STOP ASKING TO BE REMOVED FOR CHRIST SAKE”

“Who on earth are all you people and why are you bombarding my inbox?”

Just out of curiosity; do you have a distribution list that reads “Everyone in the world”? If so, please remove me from that list.
Thank you”

There were even employees which missed out on the topic and were asking for someone to resend the original e-mail, followed by some employee stating that he has spoken with officials at Guiness World Recors about the thread and thought they could even break the world record with this developing spam:

“I missed the original email. Can you please resend it again………. THANKS………..!!!!!!!!!”

“Keep calm and
Keep replying All!!!”

“Don’t stop, please, keep moving”

“Have just put the phone down from the Guinness people, they say another 64 replies and we have the new world record !!!
We can do this !”

And as a grand finale to this epic spam thread, the person in cause, Mr. “Anant Prakash” replied at last, having ‘restored’ order to his fellow co-workers’ inbox folders, with the following: