Microsoft’s email was knocked out by people asking to be taken off a list.

• On 14 October 1997, someone at Microsoft noticed they were on a distribution list called Bedlam DL3 and emailed all 13,000 members asking to be removed.
• Others hit reply all to ask to be removed too, and then a third group hit reply all to ask everyone to stop hitting reply all.
• Within about an hour there were more than 15 million emails, and the mail servers stopped, including for people who weren’t on the list.
• It took two days to clean up, and someone printed T-shirts reading “I survived Bedlam3” on the front and “Me too!” on the back.

Rodney Bliss, who was there →