Google has issued an apology and removed a temporary email feature after its April Fools' 2016 joke backfired. Gmail users woke up to find an option to send a "Mic Drop" response to email threads. It consisted of an animated gif of a minion character from Despicable Me dropping a microphone. It also subsequently muted the conversation for the sender, which led many to believe their email threads were deleted and unrecoverable. The feature was poorly received by some users who took to the Gmail Help Forum to complain, saying the "childish" animations were accidentally included in important and professional emails. "I hit this thing by accident in a professional email sending a contract. This is ridiculous and not funny at all. Remove it please!!!" one user wrote. Another claims to have lost his job saying, "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 offense 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," a forum post with the topic headline "Will Google give me a job" read. Google's Gmail team has since removed the feature and apologized, blaming the mishaps on a "bug."