A student at New York University (NYU) accidentally emailed all 39,979 students enrolled at the university on Nov. 22 after hitting “reply-all” to a message he meant to send his mother, according to NYULocal, an unofficial NYU blog.
The email sparked a phenomenon dubbed by the Internet as the “Replyallcalypse.”
Second-year NYU student Max Wiseltier made a harmless mistake. He attempted to forward an email from the bursar’s office to his mother, titled “Opting Out of the Paper Version of Your 1098T.”
“Do you want me to do this?” he had written.
But Wiseltier instead hit “reply-all,” which due to a Listserve system error in the email from the bursar’s office, automatically cc’ed every other student in the university.
Wiseltier, a business and finance major who is also minoring in computer science, quickly realized what had happened, and apologized to the student body in another email.
But this wasn’t enough to stop the flood of campus-wide responses that began to pour in, as NYU students realized their newfound power.
The “Replyallcalypse” triggered thousands of emails, which ranged from some politely asking how everyone was doing that day, to others angrily telling their classmates to stop.
“I’ll stop if he stops,” read one reply, according to NYULocal.
“People who wanted the emails to stop could have easily set up a filter to delete the thread responses,” Wiseltier told the Charlatan via email. “I don’t know why people got so mad, but it is what it is.”
One response simply consisted of an attached photo of Nicolas Cage. Others included some of life’s most puzzling philosophical debates.
“Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses, or one horse-sized duck?” a student asked, according to the blog.
Wiseltier said that at first he was “mortified,” but came to realize the hilarity of the situation, noting that his favourite response was a request by one student asking if anyone could lend them a pencil.
Wiseltier has since then appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and his story has been shared by the Today Show, in addition to countless major media outlets.
“It all started as an accident,” he said. “It snowballed and went viral pretty quickly . . . I’ve been talked about from China to England and now Canada, so it’s going pretty global.”
But for other NYU students such as Annie Shea, experiencing “Replyallcalypse” first-hand wasn’t nearly as amusing as it’s been made out to be.
“To see any of the funny, viral messages meant I had to scroll through the stream of hundreds of emails,” Shea said via email.
“Most of the responses were people continually asking people to stop emailing them . . . Looking back through some of the emails that were sent, I would have laughed at them— had it not been so annoying.”
Shea said she is “surprised” by how much coverage the story has received.
“It was a very NYU-centric thing so I’m not sure what everyone else finds so intriguing about it,” she said.
David Vogelsang, who works at NYU’s student resource centre, later acknowledged blame for the error in a statement sent to NYULocal.
“I’m the culprit behind the Lyris blunder,” Vogelsang said.
“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.’ This morning I deleted everyone on the list,” he wrote.
“I take full responsibility for this blunder and offer my sincere apologies for the frustrating situation that was created.”
