Google Says Sorry For The Mic Drop In Its Web Browser On April Fool’s Day

April Fool’s day jokes for the world’s most popular web browser Chrome, seemed to go horribly, horribly wrong.

Yes, that’s right, this year Google’s efforts on April 1^st ended up backfiring on the tech company in something of a spectacular fashion, and as Google had to admit in a blog post, its stunt caused considerably “more headaches than laughs.”

Google retracted its ‘mic drop’ option from Gmail only a few hours after launch when it became abundantly clear, the fun just didn’t seem to be happening.  A statement on its official blog stated that the internet giant had “…pranked ourselves this year.”

The original ‘mic drop’ option was added to the service for April 1^st.

The idea was that users were able to send an email and then mic drop the message after it was sent, automatically attaching a gif of a yellow minion dropping a microphone in such a manner as to convey in a humorous fashion that the conversation was over, as far as the sender was concerned, and effectively ending the conversation so no one could reply. On its own, it was actually pretty funny.

Quickly after mic drop launched however, disgruntled Gmail users started posting that due to the close proximity of the ‘mic drop’ option with the normal send button…. users were accidentally using it in conversations with clients, bosses and others, who might not necessarily get the joke.

In the end Google killed the ‘mic drop’ option pretty quickly, and followed soon after with an apology.  As part of saying sorry, Google also announced it was doing its best to sort out all the mic dropped emails that had subsequent replies in users’ inboxes so that people will at least be able to read threads and emails they were cut out of.

As an aside, Google also said that perhaps it should have asked its users for permission rather than just blanket enabling ‘mic drop’ for everyone, and also admitting that it hadn’t really considered the consequence of accidental clicks.

Google will probably put a lot more thought into next year’s effort.