Google’s April Fools’ joke went so wrong that it might have cost people’s jobs

We try to avoid as much of April Fools’ day as possible on techradar. In fact, as a rule, we’d advise sleeping in until midday, that way you’ll avoid all the terrible “jokes” entirely.

We can imagine there are a few people at Google who would like to go to bed and start the day again though after its latest feature went south very quickly.

The feature was added to Gmail as an April Fool’s joke. It was a new ‘mic drop’ button that replaced ‘Send and Archive’. Clicking the button would send everyone in the conversation a GIF of a Minion – Google’s biggest oversight was probably thinking Minions are still, or ever were, funny – and would then stop any further replies from appearing in your inbox.

Although messages would still have shown under ‘All mail’, you wouldn’t get the usual inbox notification, meaning it would be unlikely you’d see someone’s message for a long time – if ever.

Not so funny

And it’s apparently caused at least one person their job, so they claim. “Thanks to Mic Drop I just lost my job,” wrote Allan Pashby on the Google Product Forum. “I am a writer and had a deadline to meet. I sent my articles to my boss and never heard back from her. I inadvertently sent the email using the ‘Mic Drop’ send button”.

Meanwhile, Abdus Salam wrote: “I have been interviewing with this company for 3 months now and mistakenly sent the email directly to guess who? The HR! Why would you do that? I so want this job; was due to start on Monday!”

So yeah, Google screwed up big time. Fortunately the “feature” has now been removed, and Google apologised in a statement.

“Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year,” the company said in a statement. “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.”

For some people, however, it might be too late…

Source: techradar.com