A bit exaggerated (Score 2, Informative)

As one of those who was affected, this is definitely a bit exaggerated. Here's what really happened (at least, on the system that I use; I can't speak for others).

The mail servers went down for a couple of hours last Friday morning - mail couldn't be sent or received. About an hour into the outage, the sysadmins sent a Windows Messaging service message to all terminals saying that the problem was a 52Mb file called "Amarillo Video" (or something like that) which people were e-mailing internally and please don't do it any more! That was it, essentially - a short-term nuisance, nothing more.

As for why this happened - well, our computer infrastructure is pretty old and cranky. The systems that fell over were mostly head office ones in London - there are literally hundreds of separate corporate networks currently in use, held together by duct tape (or so it sometimes seems), so only a fraction of the MOD was affected in the first place. They're all due to be replaced by a shiny new Defence Information Infrastructure (http://www.mod.uk/dcsa/organisations/dii/) which will be all singing, all dancing, capable of dealing with huge files etc etc etc. (Also all Windows, but you can't have everything.)