This week, a Gmail bug caused duplicate messages to be sent from some user accounts. In certain cases, the same messages were sent over and over for several days, which, as you can imagine, must have been extremely annoying to the recipients.
The bug did not affect many users (less than 2.5% of Gmail's userbase, claims Google) but given the overall number of Gmail users -- more than 176 million by now, according to comScore's data -- it's a significant number.
Some users were extremely unhappy about this bug, which made them look bad in front of their business partners. "My company is on Google Apps and we are having this issue big time, it is about to start costing us business... We can't afford to have our staff communicating with our clients in this manner. Google Apps has been nothing but a disaster for us. I look forward to a resolution of this latest in a long line of issues," one message on the forum thread said.
The issue now seems to have been resolved. "No more duplicate emails should be going out at this point and new messages you send out now should not be affected by this issue," said a Google employee in a forum post. Well, if your Gmail account turned rogue and spammed your friends this week, at least now you have proof it was Google's fault.