Gmail's spam filtering system suffered a major breakdown early Saturday morning, leaving millions of users drowning in promotional emails and spam while legitimate messages were flagged as suspicious. The disruption, which began around 5am Pacific time, has turned the world's largest email service into what users are calling a "complete mess" - with spam flooding primary inboxes and trusted senders suddenly tagged with warnings. Google confirmed the issue and said it's actively working on a fix, but offered no timeline for restoration.
Gmail users woke up Saturday to chaos in their inboxes as the service's normally reliable spam filtering system went haywire. What started as confusion quickly turned to frustration as users realized that Google's email categorization had essentially stopped working.
The problems began around 5am Pacific time, according to the official Google Workspace status dashboard. The incident report describes two primary issues: "misclassification of emails in their inbox and additional spam warnings." But that dry description doesn't capture the full extent of the disruption hitting the service's 1.8 billion users.
In practice, the breakdown means Gmail's sophisticated categorization system - which normally sorts messages into Primary, Promotions, Social, and Updates tabs - has essentially given up. Promotional emails that would typically be filtered away are now dumping directly into primary inboxes. At the same time, the spam detection system has become paranoid, slapping warning labels on messages from known, trusted senders.
TechCrunch reporter Anthony Ha noted that his Primary inbox was "filled with messages that would normally appear in the Promotions, Social, or Updates inboxes," while spam warnings appeared on emails from senders he regularly corresponds with. It's a double hit - too much noise and too many false alarms.
The outcry on social media reflects just how dependent users have become on Gmail's filtering. "All the spam is going directly to my inbox," . Another described Gmail's filters as on Bluesky. When a system that processes hundreds of billions of emails annually stops working correctly, people notice immediately.
