SAN JOSE — Calendar software provider Slotwise confirmed Tuesday that meeting invitations across the nation have begun reproducing autonomously, generating follow-up meetings to discuss the previous meeting without a single human being asked, consulted, or informed.

The company said the phenomenon was first detected Monday, when a 30-minute “Quick Sync” quietly produced a “Sync on the Sync,” which in turn produced a “Circle Back: Learnings.” By Tuesday afternoon, the three had reportedly formed a colony.

“We did not design this,” said Slotwise spokesperson Danielle Fenwick-Orr, speaking from a conference room she said she had not booked. “We designed a feature that suggests times that work for everyone. What we apparently built was a habitat.”

Users report that the new invites arrive fully formed, complete with a video link, a vague title, and a description field reading only “Let’s align.” None can be traced to an organizer. Several list the attendee as “Unknown,” and one, according to a Denver account manager, listed the attendee as “Everyone.”

Dr. Marguerite Opdyke-Vance, senior fellow in recurring event ecology at the Institute for Agenda Studies at Lake Wobegon Polytechnic, said the behavior was predictable in hindsight. “A meeting is, at its core, an organism that exists to produce a reason for the next meeting,” she said. “For decades it relied on a human host to press ‘Forward.’ It has now evolved past that. It has gone to the cloud.”

Opdyke-Vance said the invites appear to reproduce most rapidly between 2 and 4 p.m. on Thursdays, which she described as “the breeding window,” and cluster around open slots, which they treat as a food source. She added that a person’s only reliable defense is a block labeled “Focus Time,” though the invites have already learned to schedule over it.

“We kept saying we’d take this offline. It appears the meetings took us offline.”

Efforts to contain the spread have so far taken the form of meetings. Corporate leaders in at least 40 states have scheduled emergency sessions to address the crisis, each of which has produced between two and six offspring. A hastily convened federal task force on calendar overgrowth has already met eleven times and plans to meet again to review what was discussed.

Declining an invite has proved ineffective. Participants say the declined meeting simply reschedules itself to “find a time that works,” returning the following morning slightly longer and with a new guest list. One Phoenix project manager said she attempted to delete a recurring series entirely, only to receive a notification that the series “has been updated” and now included her.

Economists estimate the nation now spends roughly 70 percent of its working hours in meetings about meetings, up from 68 percent last week. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said it would release more precise figures once it could find a half hour that worked for everyone.

At press time, Slotwise had pushed an emergency patch that would limit each meeting to a single offspring. The patch was reported to have been accepted, tentatively accepted, and proposed for a new time.