At 8:45pm on Reading Day, in response to the cybersecurity incident impacting Canvas, University of Illinois Provost Coleman sent a mass e-mail to campus that shared unprecedented news: every final exam, assignment, paper, and project deadline was cancelled on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; everything was immediately postponed.
As the e-mails rolled out, many of us learned about it from others before we saw the news itself! After collecting nearly 50 samples among the 96,308 e-mail sent, we discovered that the time you found out about it was entirely based on your e-mail address -- just like in 2019, it does not matter if you are faculty, staff, or a student. We all played the same waiting game until we got the e-mail!
Let us predict when you received it:
| Time | NetID | |
|---|---|---|
| 8:45pm | — | Timestamp on the Provost e-mail |
| 8:47pm | aa.. | First known recipient, two minutes after the e-mail timestamp, received by an aa..@illinois.edu e-mail address. |
| 8:50pm | ar.. | At an estimated rate of around 3,000 e-mails /minute, e-mails were still being sent to a..@illinois.edu e-mail addressed for the first several minutes. |
| 8:53pm | bt.. | We estimate over 10,000 e-mails were sent in six minutes ..and we're still at b..@illinois.edu. |
| 8:56pm | em.. | We estimate nearly 20,000 e-mails were sent in the first ten minutes, now reading those of us with e..@illinois.edu addresses. |
| 9:01pm | ji.. | We estimate around 40,000 e-mails were sent in the first fifteen minutes, starting to reach j..@illinois.edu addresses. |
| 9:05pm | ku.. | There appears to be a large collection of j..@illinois.edu and k..@illinois.edu e-mail addresses, spend over five minutes. We estimate there are 10,000-15,000 e-mails with j and k NetIDs. |
| 9:11pm | pb.. | We estimate that after close to 60,000 e-mails, addresses p..@illinois.edu and q..@illinois.edu began finding out finals were cancelled. |
| 9:18pm | waf | Having heard from colleagues and students, we estimate I was among the last 10,000 people to learn the news -- but not the last! |
| 9:19pm | ze.. | We estimate that close to 90,000 emails had been sent out and this is our last known recipient, but we don't have any data about zf..@illinois.edu or later to be absolutely sure! |
| 9:20pm | — | Our estimated time the last person received the e-mail. |
This work is similar to work we did in the very first semester of STAT/CS/IS 107, when we learned that class was cancelled while we were in class!
What is most notable was, several months after we shared this visualization, we heard that they updated the algorithm for sending MASSMAIL e-mails. We don't know what the upgrade was and this e-mail gave us a chance to discover any changes. We observed that emails appear to be sent faster, using the same alphabetical NetID method.
An absolutely huge thanks to everyone who forwarded me their e-mails in the middle of the night (between 2:00am and 4:00am) to allow us to create this work! 🧡💙 A special shout out to Prof. Karle Flanagan, Michelle Ru, Lillian Wang, Brendan Tang, Jinwen Li, Daniel Bac, Sayi Machiraju, Anna Wang, Will White, and dozens of others who shared the data in the middle of the night to make this possible, and then the many more who shared it with me throughout the day on Friday!
Thanks for checking this work out! :)