Google says it’s hard at work resolving an issue that allows malicious third parties to hijack your Google Calendar with unremovable spam invites. As noted by Engadget this morning, Google posted to its Calendar Help forums yesterday to say that it’s aware of the issue and “working diligently” to fix it.
“We’re aware of the spam occurring in Calendar and are working diligently to resolve this issue. We’ll post updates to this thread as they become available,” the post reads. “Learn how to report and remove spam. Thank you for your patience.” The message includes a link to another help page that tells you how to report the unwanted invites or events. Google also advises you never respond to the invite, as that could result in the spam message remaining as a crossed-out event on your calendar.
The Verge also has a handy guide detailing how to remove this especially resilient variety of spam, as well as how to tweak your Google Calendar settings to avoid getting any of these invites in the future. Effectively, you’ll have to go through a number of steps right now — like turning off settings that retain invites you’ve declined and making it so Gmail stops automatically accepting invites and automatically adding them to your calendar — as a workaround. Thankfully, Google should have its fix coming shortly.