Marine’s ‘Reply All’ Email Debacle Went Viral. and Then Memes Blew up.

The Marine Corps is going wild after an email accidentally sent to the entire service resulted in the top enlisted Marine surprising his troops and the young corporal at the center of all of it.

The latest development is the culmination of a story that started in April, when Cpl. Andrew Hundley’s boss routed his online course certificate up to colleagues for record-keeping. The message went well beyond the intended recipients.

With the online training out of the way, Hundley, a 24-year-old cyberspace defense operator, could apply for a spot at the follow-on in-person course required for promotion. That course tackles topics like public speaking and military tactics.

But when the staff sergeant hit “send,” the senior Marine accidentally unleashed a “reply allpocalyspe,” emailing the entire service and more. Reply-alls began flooding inboxes. Almost just as quickly came the memes, which would last for weeks.

Alarmed, his boss called Hundley to explain his certificate had gone to untold corners of the government.

“There’s been this problem,” Hundley recalled her saying to Business Insider. At first he was worried about either of them getting in trouble— the email had made it outside the Corps too, fielding quizzical responses from the Army, Naval Criminal Investigative Services, FBI, and even the White House, Hundley said.

“A lot of them were kind of confused why they were getting the email,” he said. Some thought it was a phishing attempt.

Despite the initial stress, Hundley noted that his leaders were quick to assuage his concerns during his rocket to Marine Corps fame and kept tabs on him as the memes kept coming.

A Change.org petition to have the service’s chief officer, Commandant Eric Smith, attend Hundley’s in-person course graduation took off, picking up over 1,600 signatures. It would be highly unusual for a Beltway-based top leader who oversees around 170,000 troops to attend the graduation for a routine enlisted course.

The commandant didn’t show up, but on Thursday, Smith’s partner, Sgt. Maj. of the Marine Corps Carlos Ruiz, appeared unannounced, amid both applause and laughter, to present Hundley and his classmates with their graduation certificates.

Marine Corps spokesperson Gunnery Sgt. Jordan Gilbert said the petition gave Ruiz a chuckle.

“The Marine Corps gods have called upon me,” Ruiz said as he entered the event Thursday. “They were setting up a schedule, and the schedule somehow ended up with — where you at, Hundley? Raise your hand.”

A sergeant major serves as a unit’s senior enlisted advisor and is the right-hand to the unit’s commanding officer— in Ruiz’s case, that’s Gen. Smith. An enlisted leader may be subordinate in rank to an officer, but they bring decades of experience and function as a team.

Among other things, sergeants major are focused on unit welfare and troop morale — topics on which Ruiz has previously testified before Congress. That may well be why he decided to surprise Hundley and others, undoubtably a morale boost for the Marines.

The email that went out about the corporal was “an unintentional, so innocent email that went to everyone,” Ruiz said. But then it went rogue. What triggered the email storm were all the people who replied all, followed by more who replied all asking the first group of people to stop.

“For three or four days, as I traveled the Corps, the question was not about barracks or quality of life,” Ruiz said, referring to the service’s $11 billion effort to overhaul shoddy barracks.

“It’s ‘Corporal Hundley!'” he exclaimed. “And that’s why the gods have called me to see you graduate.”

In an institution that reveres authentic leadership, Ruiz holds a high standing among many, including Hundley, who said that he was at once “amazed, shocked, and terrified” to see Ruiz walk in — he hadn’t expected such a senior leader to actually show up.

Ruiz presented the class with their graduation certificates and spoke briefly with Hundley afterward.

“That the Sergeant Major is taking time out of his day, and out of his schedule just to come and see us,” Hundley said. “It was an amazing feeling because it shows how much he cares.”

“He most definitely fosters this idea of care for everyone in the Marine Corps,” regardless of rank Hundley said of Ruiz.

“And I think that’s an amazing leadership trait that anyone can have, having the humility to realize that we’re all people and that we all have our own important things that we can offer up.”

Having received an overwhelming amount of congratulatory messages from around the world, Hundley said the entire experience has left him feeling humbled and eager to give back to his community. A handful of classmates asked him to sign their course certificates.

Email storms happen every now and then within the US government. In 2007, a Homeland Security Department-based email chain ended up flooding over 2 million inboxes, including those of a nuclear power station in Illinois. More recently, in 2023, the Senate’s email system tanked after thousands of staffers replied all to a security drill. The Hundley email debacle, however, might be the military’s most amusing one.