Gmail Vowel Outage ? Another April Fool :)

When I logged into Gmail last evening, I found it peculiarly interesting. It looked as it was texted out and all the vowels  GML ? WTF ?!were missing from the home page of Gmail. Combine it with the TEXTp mode of YouTube, I guess all the vowels and text were used in the TEXTp mode (that's one of my most obnoxious guesses,but I guess that works :P ). As the official Gmail blog commented -

Vowel outage ? Bullshit !! It all makes sense,just read it carefully ! Also it redirected to Gmail mobile and then redirected to normal Gmail interface.

At 6:01 am Pacific Time, during routine maintenance at one of our datacenters, the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter 'a' for a subset of users. As error rates escalated, the strain spread to other datacenters. We worked quickly to avoid a cascading failure of the entire alphabet by implementing a stopgap solution that limited the damage to the letters 'a,' 'e,' 'i,' 'o,' and 'u.' As a result, we're experiencing Gmail’s first temporary vowel outage. (We’re still investigating whether the letter 'y' is impacted and will post an update here shortly.)

Bullshit ! The link Gmail was redirecting in the URL (on close inspection) was of Gmail mobile,and redirected to normal Gmail Inbox. I tried changing user agents but none worked. Also the text on the homepage made sense, like it was SMS’d out of some Gmail freak.

Any guesses ? My most concrete one will be it was one of Google's April Fool Jokes :)

 

Gmail Blog

 

Posted by XERO . ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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