Dreaded ‘reply-all’ triggers Wells Fargo email slowdown

The longtime bane of email users – the “reply-all” button – triggered serious email delays at Wells Fargo last week.

After an email went out with 90,000 recipients on Friday, some Wells Fargo employees began hitting “reply-all,” according to an internal report obtained by the Observer. “This has caused the email server queues to back up,” the report said.

The bank’s servers had a backlog of 4 million email messages to process at one point, according to another internal document.

The backup caused delays in receiving internal and external emails, spurring problems for various lines of business at the San Francisco-based bank. For example, in Wells Fargo Securities, one area experienced delays in clearing transactions that were supposed to be completed in one hour “before they have regulatory impact,” one of the reports said.

Wells Fargo spokesman Josh Dunn told the Observer the bank had some “minor technical difficulties” with emails on Friday “but those have been resolved with no compliance or security issues.”

Wells Fargo is the nation’s third-largest U.S. bank by assets with about 270,000 employees. After the bank’s purchase of Wachovia in 2008, Charlotte became its biggest employee hub, with about 23,600 workers.

This story was originally published May 31, 2016 at 10:41 AM with the headline "Dreaded ‘reply-all’ triggers Wells Fargo email slowdown."