Joke's On Google As Minion April Fools Prank Backfires

Due to a failed Gmail April Fool's Day mishap,
images of Minions went out with some Gmail
users messages without the sender intending to,
causing lots of problems. 

Never trust a Minion.

As everyone who is a fan of Minions, those pill-shaped yellow characters from "Despicable Me" who also have their own franchise, they usually muck things up pretty spectacularly.

Usually hilariously, too, but you have to be careful.

So Google learned when it used Minions in an April Fools Day feature it introduced in its popular Gmail.

The April Fools Joke that was added to Gmail was a feature in which a GIF of a Minion  goofily dropping a mic.  The thought was you could add it to an email message

Problem was, it was extremely easy to accidentally hit the feature to automatically send the Minion GIF with an email.

Even worse, there was a bug in the system so that the Minion GIF would automatically go out even if the person sending the email never wanted it to.

According to Mashable, one Minion GIF went out with an emailed prayer request to 50 people, mortifying the sender. Another sent it with an important job application, even though the guy never hit the button to send the Minions. So much for that job.

Seeing the chaos unfolding in front of them, Google frantically shut off the dropped mic Minion thing before even more harm could be done.

But as ArsTechnica put it:

"At the very least, here's hoping that the next time Google pulls a prank, it doesn't do it with mission critical software used by millions of people."

And if I inadvertently send weird Minions in an email, I'm really, really, REALLY sorry.