Google April Fool’s prank boomerangs
Steve Carell, right, a cast member in “Despicable Me 2,” competed for attention in June 2013 on the carpet with a minion character from the film in Universal City, Calif. The company added a button to its email service Thursday that allowed users to fire out a minion GIF, a character from the animated film “Despicable Me,” which would drop a microphone and then mute responses to whatever email the user at sent. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)
NEW YORK » Google is acknowledging that it pranked itself after an April Fool’s Day Gmail tweak angered some people who use Google’s email for work.
The company added a button to its email service that allowed users to fire out a minion GIF, a character from the animated film “Despicable Me,” which would drop a microphone and then mute responses to whatever email the user had sent.
The Gmail Help Forum on Thursday was soon populated by angry users who say they unintentionally attached a minion dropping a mic during important business communications.
Google Inc. apologized and turned off the feature, saying that due to a bug, the mic drop “inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs.”
2 responses to “Google April Fool’s prank boomerangs”
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April Fool’s Day is a joke anyway; it causes too many problems.
This calls into question the judgement of every executive who approved this childish prank without regard to the consequences to it’s business customers. It’s unfortunate that an “Emotional Maturity” test hasn’t yet been devised to identify the risk of questionable decisions that backfire in such a spectacular fashion. Boneheads.