Pro Hack

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  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 -

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

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This post was written by: Rishabh Dangwal

Rishabh Dangwal is a no-nonsense network geek who likes to play retro games and emulators in free time. Follow him on Twitter