I intentionally wrote the story without referring to the article to let people think for themselves about the meaning, and it makes me very happy that this was what you thought!

Ironically we kind of relied on e-mail alerts for too long and would kinda sorta break Gmail. While it was probably just the web/IMAP interface or browser/client itself struggling, trying to bulk delete tens of thousands of emails while hundreds more per second were coming in often had incoherent results.