If you’ve been following the April Fools pranks from Google today, you’ll be familiar with their Send + Mic Drop prank. If not, the prank effectively let you hit a new button in Gmail that let you send a message, at which point Gmail would insert a GiiF of a Minion dropping the mic and then archive the email – problem is, not everyone wants their email archived.
To be fair, the Send + Mic Drop did throw up a pop-up warning when you hit the button warning that the message would be archived – but who reads popup messages? It’s still a potentially harmful action with email a very widely used tool for business and you don’t want important business email threads archived when you’re just trying out a silly prank.
The GMail support forum has been inundated with unhappy Gmail users and with almost a billion Gmail users now active, if you have even 1 percent of those people affected, that’s a lot of unhappy people.
The furore has been noticed by Google who has updated the GMail blog to advise the ‘feature’ has been pulled. Google has said:
UPDATE: 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.
It’s a cautionary tale that perhaps messing with email isn’t such a good idea.
There is still a lot of amusing – non-destructive – April Fools Day pranks running from Google as well as other tech companies which we’ve rounded up here.
The other problem is that this one wasn’t very funny, it was just lame!