A seemingly innocuous email exchange about a holiday gift potluck went awry after it was mistakenly sent to more than 25,000 Utah state employees. 
 
 A cascade of curt, angry and confused responses poured in to a "reply all" email chain Friday that initially sought to discuss a holiday potluck. Utah Department of Technology Services employees took to social media to urge the tens of thousands of respondents to stop replying to the email chain that deluged state employees, contractors and businesses across Utah. 
 
 And as commonly occurs amid corporate and government "reply all" chaos, the thousands of "Sent from my iPhone" messages demanding to be removed from the email thread only deepened the communication quicksand. 
 
 Getty Images Justin Sullivan/Staff 
 
 "So this is happening right now. It’s Replyall-gate 2018. Adventures in state government. #ReplyAll Actually don’t reply all," wrote Joe Dougherty, a Public Information Officer for -- perhaps ironically -- the Utah Division of Emergency Management. 
 
 Dozens of responses posted to social media by Utah state government employees and affiliates ranged from inquisitive, "Is it a white elephant type of swap?" to comical, "I'm sorry you have to uninvite the entire State Government," to the downright angry, "Remove me from this email thread now!" 
 
 The thousands of polite responses asking to be removed from the "reply all" emails clogged up phones and state employee computers for several hours Friday morning. But those seemingly helpful replies along with dozens of "EVERYONE STOP RESPONDING" responses only amplified the crescendo of emails. 
 
 Screenshot: Twitter/Joe Dougherty 
 
 Utah Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox added a little humor and weighed in on the "cc" calamity Friday afternoon, "This is real and it’s an emergency. Started out as a potluck and $5 white elephant gift exchange in one department and someone accidentally cc’d every state employee. I fear this will never end." 
 
 "This was a genuine crisis, but it happens every day on a smaller level. Some people simply can't not #replyall, so prevention is key: send large group emails to yourself w/ bcc to other recipients, and hope somebody doesn't 'loop' others in," tweeted Josh Loftin, Director of Communications and Public Information Officer at the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. 
 
 Salt Lake City's local CBS affiliate KUTV reported that neither the offending sender nor the department they worked in was publicly divulged as of the end of the workday Friday. ||||| Someone mistakenly sent a potluck invite to 25,000 Utah state employees — nearly the entire state workforce — Friday, reported KUTV. Then the reply-all emails began. 
 
 
 
 
 
 “So this is happening right now. It’s Replyall-gate 2018. Adventures in state government,” wrote Utah public information office Joe Dougherty on Twitter about 9:30 a.m. Friday. 
 
 His post included a long chain of reply-all emails to the 25,000 recipients of the errant invite. Many begged fellow respondents to stop hitting reply-all, while others resorted to all-caps demands to “STOP THE MADNESS.” 
 
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 So this is happening right now. It’s Replyall-gate 2018. Adventures in state government. #ReplyAll Actually don’t reply all. pic.twitter.com/8loT09CM4s — Joe Dougherty (@PIO_Joe) December 7, 2018 
 
 “I … want to die,” reported one state worker on Twitter, while another reported receiving 51 reply-all emails to the invite in mere minutes. 
 
 someone over at the department of corrections accidentally invited every single state of utah employee to their holiday potluck....and now there's an email chain....and i .....want to die — too depressed to put up Christmas decorations (@the1kim) December 7, 2018 At 9:27 am I got this email which was apparently sent by the Dept of Corrections to every employee of the State of Utah. Ten minutes later I’m up to 51 responses of people saying “please don’t reply to all.” I’m wondering how many hundreds more I’ll get before DTS pulls the plug. pic.twitter.com/4y8LhY85xu — Peter Gessel (@PeterGessel) December 7, 2018 dear lord. someone sent an email to the entire State of Utah and now everyone is replying to all. — Amanda Rock (@amanda__reads) December 7, 2018 
 
 Even Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox commented on the fiasco on Twitter, calling it “an emergency.” 
 
 “This is real and it’s an emergency,” Cox wrote. “Started out as a potluck and $5 white elephant gift exchange in one department and someone accidentally cc’d every state employee. I fear this will never end.” 
 
 This is real and it’s an emergency. Started out as a potluck and $5 white elephant gift exchange in one department and someone accidentally cc’d every state employee. I fear this will never end. https://t.co/fL1NBOlsZW — Spencer Cox (@SpencerJCox) December 7, 2018 
 
 But by 11:10 a.m. Friday, the flood of reply-all emails seemed to be abating, Dougherty reported on Twitter. 
 
 “Ok. It’s 11:10 am and I think it’s safe to say the great #ReplyAll disaster of 2018 is finally over. Thank you for playing!” he wrote. 
 
 Ok. It’s 11:10 am and I think it’s safe to say the great #ReplyAll disaster of 2018 is finally over. Thank you for playing! pic.twitter.com/WXtK1G01Fs — Joe Dougherty (@PIO_Joe) December 7, 2018 
 
 “A reply all broadcast storm is the closest we’ll get to perpetual energy,” commented one observer on Twitter. 
 
 A reply all broadcast storm is the closest we’ll get to perpetual energy. — Dave Holzer and the turtle he rode in on. (@daholzer) December 7, 2018 ||||| An apparently simple email about a holiday potluck at a state office went off the rails Friday when it was accidentally sent to approximately 25,000 state employees. (Photo: KUTV FILE) 
 
 An apparently simple email about a holiday potluck at a state office in Utah went off the rails Friday when it was accidentally sent to approximately 25,000 state employees. 
 
 
 
 One early respondent seemed to anticipate the coming storm of emails by replying to all, “braces self for receiving thousands of emails from people hitting ‘reply all’ to say they got added by mistake.” 
 
 Then the ‘reply-all’ responses began. 
 
 “STOP REPLYING TO ALL”, one ‘reply-all’ respondent wrote. 
 
 “Please remove me from this email,” another employee replied to all. 
 
 “EVERYONE STOP RESPONDING!!” responded one angry email. 
 
 
 
 A photo posted by state spokesperson Joe Dougherty showed dozens of emails sent over the course of just a few minutes around 9:30 a.m. 
 
 Dougherty posted around 11:15 a.m. to say the email chain seemed to have run its course. 
 
 Neither the offending sender, nor the department they work for were identified. 
 
 
 
 “I fear this will never end,” Lt. Governor Spencer Cox posted to twitter around 3:30 p.m. 
 
 Reply-all catastrophes pop up occasionally. A few years ago Reuters was caught up in a reply-all chain that went between the company’s 33,000 employees. That ordeal prompted at least 600 response emails. ||||| Ivanka Trump, the first daughter and adviser to the president, used a personal email address to communicate with a government official after her father took office, according to documents that the nonprofit American Oversight obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and shared exclusively with Newsweek. 
 
 The documents show that on February 28, Trump—identifying herself as Ivanka Kushner—emailed Linda McMahon, the administrator of the United States Small Business Administration, from a personal domain. At the time, Trump was operating inside the White House in a nonofficial capacity. She wrote that she wanted McMahon’s agency and her staff to “explore opportunities to collaborate” on issues related to “women’s entrepreneurship.” She copied on the correspondence the government email addresses of two other federal employees, Dina Powell and Julie Radford. 
 
 Related: Jared Kushner Has Been Using a Private Email Account for Work 
 
 Trump became an unpaid federal employee in March. But multiple government ethics experts say she likely could have had access to a White House email account in February, given that she is first daughter. Radford, her chief of staff, had a White House email address at the time. 
 
 Ivanka Trump was sitting in on White House meetings around the time she sent the email, including one between her father and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a gathering of the business advisory council. 
 
 The news that Trump used a personal email address for government work follows the disclosure on Sunday that Jared Kushner—Trump’s husband and a senior adviser to President Donald Trump—also used a personal email address for official work. That disclosure was made by Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner. 
 
 “Yet again we see that there’s one rule for the Trump family and another for everyone else,” Austin Evers, the executive director of American Oversight and a former senior counsel at the Department of State, said in a statement to Newsweek. “It’s simply breathtaking that both Ivanka and Jared Kushner would conduct government [work] on a personal email account after running a campaign centered on that very issue. The fact that they would brazenly ignore rules governing email use raises even more questions about their judgement and fitness to hold positions in the White House.” 
 
 Now that Trump is an official employee at the White House, her communications are not subject to FOIA requests—although they are subject to a law that requires them to be preserved. 
 
 In a statement to Newsweek, a White House spokesperson pointed out that Trump was not a federal employee at the time she sent the February 28 email. When she became a federal employee in March, “she made clear that one of her reasons for doing so was to ensure that she would have access to government-issued communications devices and receive an official email account to protect government records,” the spokesperson said. The spokesperson added that prior to her obtaining an official account, Trump’s emailing other official accounts “ensured the records were preserved and available under the Federal Records Act.” Trump did not have an official email account as a first daughter at the time, according to the spokesperson. 
 
 Politico first reported on Sunday that Kushner had communicated with administration officials via an email address set up during the presidential transition period. He exchanged at least two dozen or so emails that way, according to the outlet. As the report said, there is no evidence that the emails contained classified or sensitive information. 
 
 “Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Lowell, the lawyer, said in a statement on Sunday to several news outlets. “Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account. These [were] usually forwarded news articles or political commentary, and most often occurred when someone initiated an exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.” 
 
 During the 2016 presidential election, President Trump and other Republicans made Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email system while secretary of state a central issue. (That case involved a far greater number of emails and also private servers, not just email addresses.) The FBI investigated her using that system, and Clinton has partly blamed a disclosure that former FBI Director James Comey made about the case 11 days before the election for her loss. Trump supporters would chant “lock her up,” referring to Clinton, and did so as recently as last Friday, at a rally in Alabama for Senator Luther Strange that Trump attended. Trump replied to the chanting, referring to the attorney general: “You’ve got to speak to Jeff Sessions about that.” 
 
 Republicans besides Ivanka Trump and Kushner have used personal email accounts while in the White House, too. In January, Newsweek learned that people who were then senior officials, including Kushner, Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon, had active accounts on a Republican National Committee (RNC) email system. The committee deleted the accounts after Newsweek published an article about them. “There is nothing wrong with having an RNC account if it is not used for any official government business,” RNC spokesman Ryan Mahoney told Newsweek at the time. “In this case, the officials previously employed by the Trump campaign never had functional email accounts with the RNC. The RNC has various distribution lists to communicate with state parties or campaigns, and as a byproduct these contact groups are assigned RNCHQ.org addresses that only forward to external accounts at their respective organizations.” 
 
 As Newsweek previously reported, the George W. Bush administration “lost” 22 million emails between 2003 and 2009. The emails at the time were stored on a private email server owned by the RNC. 
 
 The Presidential Records Act requires the preservation of certain correspondence by people including the president’s immediate staff and advisers. Federal employees are also required to maintain records under the Federal Records Act. 
 
 “Incidental use of a personal email is not that big a deal,” says Andy Wright, an associate professor at Savannah Law School who served as associate counsel to former President Barack Obama and is a founding editor of the online forum Just Security. “But if you’re using it as a separate infrastructure to try and avoid scrutiny, that becomes obviously a lot more problematic. I think we’re still waiting to see how much this was relied on as an alternate means of communication to avoid the system, versus incidental use.” (Newsweek has published articles by Wright.) 
 
 Lowell was not available to comment on Monday.
– "STOP THE MADNESS!!!!," "dear lord," and "I want to die" were just a few of the responses to what was meant to be a routine email Friday about a seasonal potluck party in a Utah state office, per the Miami Herald. What caused the holiday hubbub: The email meant for one department was accidentally sent to more than 25,000 employees throughout the state, leading to what Newsweek calls "a cascade of curt, angry, and confused responses" when recipients started hitting "reply all" in their return correspondence, KUTV reports. Unable to simply ignore the mass email, hordes of workers, both irritated and amused, tried to get off the "reply all" chain by … replying to all with that request, which Newsweek notes "only deepened the communication quicksand." "It's Replyall-gate 2018. Adventures in state government," one worker tweeted as it was happening, while another worried the messages wouldn't taper off: "I fear this will never end." In addition to the snark and outrage, some replies were genuine queries about what to bring to the potluck, as well as to the white-elephant gift exchange also set to take place. A Utah communications professional offers some advice to those who want to avoid the same "reply all" fiasco happening when they have their own email to send out. "Prevention is key: send large group emails to yourself w/ bcc to other recipients, and hope somebody doesn't 'loop' others in," he tweeted. Neither the person who sent the email, nor the department, had been IDed by EOD Friday.