Massive Fail For Google On April Fool's Day

Along with April Fool's jokes come the inevitable April Fool's fails. There will be the lame jokes that cause your friends to roll their eyes and then there will be the stupid ones that aren't funny at all, and also the "surprises" that will mostly just annoy everyone on Facebook when you post your fake engagement/pregnancy/big announcement. And unfortunately, it looks like this year Google will be joining the rest of the fools with failed attempts because their prank didn't go as planned. 

Along with April Fool's jokes come the inevitable April Fool's fails.

If you logged into your Gmail last night or maybe still this morning, you might have seen the new "Gmail Mic Drop" button that would give you the last word in a thread with the ultimate GIF reply, a mic dropping minion. The response was easy to use with a simple click of the "send + mic drop" button, which happened to be right where the usual "send + archive" button is that many people use on a daily basis to keep their emails organized. You can imagine the chaos that ensued next.

Okay, so it wasn't that bad, but there were some people who unexpectedly sent their boss some attitude in the form of a minion GIF which might not be well received in everyone's work environment. Other issues that were reported said the GIF sent with emails using the regular send button. Still, there were other more dramatic cases, both hypothetical and real. One user accidentally sent the reply as a response to a potential job interviewer and another writer claims to have lost a job when he didn't receive a response from his boss. Turns out muting responses from employers isn't such a great idea. Oops. The Gmail team had a lot of ticked off people before April Fool's day was even in full swing. The official Gmail blog issued an apology saying, "Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year. 😟 Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs. We’re truly sorry. The feature has been turned off. If you are still seeing it, please reload your Gmail page."

I guess when you have millions of users who rely on your service for their business needs and important communications, you might not want to play around with goofy send button options. The feature has since been removed but some users are still seeing the option and apparently one of the other "bug issues" does leave the possibility of the GIF being sent in future emails, even if the user did not press the button today when the feature was enabled. The slew of complaints that has already come in may get worse before anything gets better.