A notification test conducted by Microsoft accidentally reached production devices, making a number of Windows 10 users believe their computers got infected with malware.

The notifications, which were seemingly sent by Microsoft Movies, included weird titles that once again suggested a possible virus infection.

“Test notification,” “thsi test notification,” and “this is test notification” are some of the messages that appeared on Windows 10 devices and then saved in the Action Center.

Clicking on one of these notifications launched Microsoft News, but the app then failed with a standard “an error occurred” message. Refreshing the page didn’t make any difference.

Users who received the messages described them on reddit (another thread here) as “suspicious” and several of them thought the notifications were submitted by malware.

“I found three of them this morning. They’re all suspicious, but the first two were oddly stated and misspelled. I panicked and almost wiped the machine,” one user explains.

Issue already fixed

A Microsoft engineer explained in the reddit thread that it was all just a test and the notifications weren’t supposed to reach production devices.

“Due to a configuration error in the Windows 10 News app notifications (English edition), some customers reported seeing test notifications. This issue was resolved on March 29th via a configuration update for existing versions. We have also released a new version of the app that addresses the issue. The notification does not affect the application or use, and this issue should now be resolved,” the message reads.

At the time of writing this article, the issue is presumably resolved, so no such notifications should be sent to your devices. While it’s hard to understand how such blunders occur, especially because production devices are involved, it’s believed that only a small number of computers actually received the odd messages.