Holiday Potluck Reply All Email Causes Madness For Utah State Employees

Government employees in Utah probably had to spend more time than usual cleaning up their email inboxes this weekend. Around 25,000 state workers in the Beehive State accidentally got looped into an innocuous email about a holiday office potluck, prompting a chaotic, statewide reply all chain, according to KUTV-2.

Utah state employee Joe Dougherty tweeted screenshots of his inbox, filled with other state workers using the reply all function to alert the original sender that they had been mistakenly included in the email.

According to Dougherty’s tweets, the incident lasted a couple of hours on Friday before dying down. Lieutenant governor Spencer Cox also took to Twitter to call the situation “real and an emergency.”

“I fear this will never end,” Cox tweeted.

The email originated from an unknown state department, simply looping in employees on an office potluck with a white elephant gift exchange. The maximum cost for gifts was said to be $5. The original sender of the email was not identified, per KUTV-2.