If your primary Gmail inbox looked a little ‘spammy’ over the weekend, fret not, it wasn’t your mistake — Google somehow broke Gmail’s email classification system.
The issue first appeared on Saturday, January 24, and lasted until Sunday, January 25.
Emails that would normally go straight into your ‘Social,’ ‘Updates,’ ‘Forums,’ ‘Promotions,’ and most importantly, ‘Spam’ folders, started showing up in the primary inbox.
If that wasn’t enough, emails from trusted sources started being flagged with spam warnings, causing false alarms to ring all over. This wasn’t an isolated issue, it was a platform-wide one. Additionally, as the system struggled with the weight of misclassification, email delivery was also strained, with users experiencing delays in receiving emails.
Google, on its Workspace status dashboard, states that the issue has now been fixed, but “misclassified spam warnings from the incident may persist for existing messages received before the issue resolution,” as pointed out by TechCrunch.
Waiting on Google’s analysis
Credit: Google
Gmail should now be back to its organized self, but for those who were active over the weekend, seeing ads and promotional emails next to important work-related emails must have been a jarring experience.
Here’s what most primary inboxes looked like while the issue was active. Note that emails dated January 24–25 might still appear this way.
Google added that it’ll soon have more to share. “We will publish an analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation,” indicating that we’ll soon know whether this was because of a botched update or a server-side hiccup.
