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Comment by _notreallyme_ | Hacker News Reader

At amazon in 2010, someone sent an email to everyone on the "all" mailing list to ask if anyone had seen it. A reply-all storm ensued, and despite several people asking to stop hitting the reply-all button, it continued for several days.

The management had to chime in and sometimes threatened people with punishment if they continued participating to the reply-all storm.

If you ignored the conversation you may not have seen it, but most reply-all storm ended up with someone saying something the line of "we don't care about your wallet".

Anyway, asking people to stop hitting the reply-all button is far from being the latest reply-all on these kind of things...

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>> If you ignored the conversation you may not have seen it, but most reply-all storm ended up with someone saying something the line of "we don't care about your wallet".

Not quite. It started with a meeting invite that was accidentally sent to everyone. The meeting was for the Amazon Wallet team (I think they did something with payments, etc.) for whatever work they were doing at the time.

Most people ignored the meeting invite and just deleted it, but someone hit "Reply All" and said something to the effect of "I know this meeting invite was not for me, but I wanted to make sure that whoever was supposed to get it did not miss the meeting."

From there, it turned into a "Reply All" storm with lots of people replying all with "Please do not reply all".

Others thought it was funny and sent memes. One guy was so bold to promote his indie rock band that was taking off.

The incident is famous and became known as "Wallet", but the name comes from the Amazon Wallet team.

Ah, thank you for more context.

I arrived a few months after that, so someone tried to explain to me but either my memory is wrong or the explanation was flawed.

There's a video on Broadcast of Russ Grandinetti emceeing an all hands, and he opens with stats from the Wallet incident. It is hilarious, folks at Amazon should watch it.

The eventual solution was that email lists with more than k (500?) people on it required an admin to approve all messages going out on that list.

It really simplified things.

500 is still generous... If I recall right, the company I work at uses 30 as a threshold.

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