Every year, for April Fools’ Day, Google goes all out with their pranks and jokes. Some are pretty funny, and some are not so funny. And that is the case this year for the Gmail team. Unlike other companies, many of Google’s pranks are actually real things. For instance, the Snoopavision from YouTube allows you to watch a video next to Snoop Dogg in 360-degrees. However when it came to Gmail, they opted to do something a bit different, and add in a button for a Mic Drop. Now the sender doesn’t see what this does, but the person receiving the message sees a GIF of a minion dropping a mic. What could go wrong? Well quite a few things.
There are a few GIFs going around on Twitter of people’s emails with this GIF in there, and with some email subjects, it’s definitely not appropriate. There were even a few people complaining on Google’s product forums this morning, about how this cost them a job and other things. It definitely wasn’t their best prank, and early this morning Google opted to remove the prank and apologized on their official blog for the matter. Gmail also urges anyone that still sees the mic drop button to go ahead and reload the page and it should disappear. Stating in their blog “Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year.”
Gmail has some really cool features, this may not have been their best feature, unfortunately. Hopefully no one saw any big damage from this April Fools’ Prank that didn’t go the way Google wanted it too. Although we did see one email from a Funeral Home that may have lost some business due to this prank. Don’t worry because the other Google teams have plenty of April Fools’ Pranks, some of which are pretty funny. If you haven’t seen the other pranks and jokes going around today, check out our roundup of all of the pranks right here.
It doesn’t look like the Mic Drop feature was around very long, although it would be cool to have GIPHY integrated into Gmail, but perhaps in a better way than this Mic Drop feature was done.