Google pulls ill-advised ‘mic drop' April Fool joke from Gmail

Google has retracted its 'mic drop' option from Gmail after complaints from its users, just a few hours after the feature was added for April Fool's day. "It looks like we pranked ourselves this year," the company said on its official blog, apologizing for the feature, and blaming a bug for causing "more headaches than laughs." Those still seeing the option are advised to reload Gmail.

The option was added to the service last night and allowed users to "send and mic drop" their emails, automatically attaching a gif of a minion — those irritating yellow monstrosities — disdainfully tossing away a microphone. The message was intended to humorously convey that the sender is vacating the conversation, but some users were said they accidentally sent it to bosses, clients, and other people who might not appreciate a mic-dropping minion.

The problem was not so much with the content (although a minion in 2016, Google? Really?), but the execution. The new button replaced Gmail's "send and archive" option, an actually helpful option that lets you close out conversations and file the email string away in your records. Regular users of Gmail's send and archive feature could have found that their muscle memory betrays them, sending an awkward gif to an unexpected recipient. Bugs were also reported that have saw people send the gif even when using the regular "send" option.

Here’s how easy it was to send:

And this was the result: