Oops, Google’s bad!
The global giant apologized on Friday after its April Fools Day prank went so off course that it actually got someone fired.
The company had tried to play along with the unique occasion via a temporary Gmail feature titled Mic Drop.
The feature was comprised of an orange “Send” button that would add to your message a GIF of a Minion dropping a microphone and automatically archive any responses.
This would thereby give you the impression of having the last word in any conversation in which you were a participant.
HOWEVER…
… this new button looked far too similar to the regular “Send” button. And it was also located right alongside the regular “Send” button.
And it also replaced a “Send and Archive” button that some Gmail users enable.
The catastrophic result was that many people sent a Minion GIF in a professional email by accident, including Andy Baio, former Kickstarter CTO and founder of XOXO Festival.
“I can’t believe how short-sighted Gmail’s “Drop Mic” April 1 joke is. It replaces the “Send+Archive” button, and attaches GIFs to sent mail,” he wrote in a critical Tweet today.
A writer named Allan Pashby, meanwhile, says he lost a job when he inadvertently used the Mic Drop feature to submit an article… didm’ hear back from his editor… and then received an angry voicemail about the prank.
“Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs,” Google software engineer Victor-bogdan Anchidin wrote by way of apology.
“We’re truly sorry.”
The Mic Drop button, as you might imagine, has been removed by Google.
