Google announced the October 2022 spam update on October 19, 2022, around 11 am ET, describing it as a global release affecting all languages and estimating about a week for the rollout. It needed far less: Google's ranking updates page recorded "The rollout was complete as of October 21, 2022", less than 48 hours after launch and much faster than the 8 days the November 2021 spam update had taken.
Spam updates are periodic improvements to Google's automated spam detection, including SpamBrain, its AI-based spam-prevention system. Google did not say whether this release focused on link spam, content spam or other violation types, only that it improved detection broadly. Unlike a core update, a drop tied to a spam update has a concrete cause: Google's systems judged the site to be violating its spam policies.
Google's guidance for affected sites is to review those policies, fix any violations and then wait: making changes "may help a site improve if our automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies". Because this rollout was so short, the diagnostic window is unusually clean; if rankings or traffic moved sharply between October 19 and 21, 2022, this update is the leading suspect.