BP caught in hilarious worldwide reply all email chain chaos

THIS is why you should always check before replying all. Oil giant BP caught up in an email chain snowstorm that sent the company into mail meltdown.

Here's Anant! The man who was subject of the original email. He's now known across BP's global ne...

IT STARTED with an ordinary, routine email. But by accidentally grouping thousands of employees as recipients, one email ended up sending oil giant BP into worldwide chaos and a reply all chain that nearly broke records.

We know how annoying a reply all chain can be in the office. But Gawker has reported that at BP this event snowballed into a day of madness.

It began with:

"Hi Shahid,

We have removed Anant Prakash from the OMS Navigator Users distribution list. Let us know if you have any concerns."

But the original sender accidentally sent it to the entire distribution list, which contained practically the whole company. But before a "please kindly ignore" email was even composed, the reply all storm began to swirl.

"I have no idea who this is and can you remove me from this email," one response said.

"Similarly I think I was added to the distribution in error"

There are always the cool-headed people in a crisis situation who call for order:

OK we have all been added in error and the guy who sent the original email has already recognised his mistake!

But asking the masses to ignore the chain was futile and only made things worse as BP workers in different timezones woke up to the enormous email chain.

OK it is ignored

Keep me in the loop please, I love this madness! :)

After more and more reply all emails flooded in with people not knowing what was going on and being asked to be removed to the list and people replying all to those request things began to get heated. And the caps lock came out:

"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"

It seemed the employees then began to suffer from some sort of deliriousness after the head-spinning amount of replies:

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

"Keep calm and

Keep replying All!!!"

"Don't stop, please, keep moving"

The chain became so long that some employees began to think it could be record-breaking:

A"s the Carpenters once sang ' Its only just begun '…….

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 !"

Here's Anant! The man who was subject of the original email. He's now known across BP's global network. Source: LinkedIn

Then finally the masses of email recipients finally heard from Anant Prakash, the mystery man who was the main subject of the original email:

To the whole BP family who have taken the time to email me today Have a wonderful weekend - I'm off to the pub.

Order has been restored.