Is Google playing an April Fools prank or is it just us?

Its a typical late night blogging for us here at SoyaCincau. Whilst about to log in into our Gmail accounts we noticed something weird with the login page.

Google playing an April Fools prank or are we just plain tired?

Anyone else seeing this?

Update (00:07): Apparently it’s not a prank and a serious “vowel outtage“.

Google blog says: 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.)

Very interesting. Let’s see how this unfolds.

Update (02:53): The “vowel outage” could very well be true. Google had already pranked everyone with the Topeka thing.

Update (09:05): Yes, it’s a prank. We’ve all been had.