Today is that one day of the year when you really have to be extra careful what you’re reading on the internet or what anyone is saying or doing to you because they’re actually allowed to prank you and there are no repercussions. Well, there shouldn’t be at least, but if you were an unwilling victim to Google’s April Fool’s Day prank then you may have lost your job as a result of it.

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The company had the smart idea to introduce what they termed the ‘Google Mic Drop’ to people using their Gmail accounts at the stroke of  midnight in Australia. This added a GIF of a Minion dropping a mic and spinning away to the end of your email, and also meant that if anyone tried to reply to it then you wouldn’t see it. You had essentially dropped the mic and that was the end of the conversation.

However, because Google didn’t announce this feature and it was very easy to utilise it without even knowing it due to its close proximity to the usual send button (see below), a lot of people utilised it without even knowing about it. As such, their recipients thought they were complete dickheads, especially when they didn’t acknowledge their replies:

Here’s a couple of SOB stories from people in the Gmail forums:

Thanks to Mic Drop I just lost my job.

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.There were corrections that needed to be made on my articles and I never received her replies.

My boss took offence to the Mic Drop animation and assumed that I didn’t reply to her because I thought her input was petty (hence the Mic Drop). I just woke up to a very angry voicemail from her which is how I found out about this ‘hilarious’ prank.

WHAT A HARMLESS APRIL FOOL'S JOKE, WHAT COULD GO WRONG pic.twitter.com/Maw8a6VUSA

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) April 1, 2016

Yeah that’s really not so good Google. In any case, Google have quickly pulled the ‘prank’ and apologised to anyone affected by it.

To be honest, I’m surprised they even bothered doing it in the first place because it really isn’t even that funny to send someone a GIF with a Minion dropping a mic? And it’s not even a prank?

Yeah I mean it’s cool to do that without people knowing it because that is actually a prank, but surely they must have known that there were about a million ways it could backfire when they thought it up? And it did backfire pretty spectacularly by the looks of things. Perplexing.

For some actual good pranks (you should be looking at this if you work for Google) click here.