According to a post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, the Penguin search algorithm ranking signal was updated across all languages on 23 September 2016.

Key changes:

• For the first time, Penguin data will be refreshed in real time, which means that ranking changes will occur much faster, essentially immediately following a recrawl/reindex.
• Penguin is “more granular”, i.e., it adjusts ranking piecewise “based on spam signals” rather than simply changing the ranking of the entire site.

Quoting Google’s blog post:

“…webmasters should be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling websites. It's also important to remember that updates like Penguin are just one of more than 200 signals we use to determine rank.”

Real-time refreshing and increased “granularity” both sound like beneficial improvements for Webmasters and marketers, because they should reduce the cycle time for responding to any adverse ranking changes.