Since 2004, Google has been pranking the world every year with creative jokes, websites and fake product launches keeping us guessing whether the company is serious or joking. After all, the tech giant did launch Gmail on April 1, 2004 offering users 1GB of storage space, a feature unheard of in the past. Before that, between 1998 and 2004, we got the occasional April fools prank here and there. However, the company will not be parking us this year, breaking its 16-year streak and honestly, that makes us very sad. This information comes from an email obtained by Business Insider.
The email reads, “This year, we’re going to take the year off from [April Fools’ Day] out of respect for all those fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Our highest goal right now is to be helpful to people, so let’s save the jokes for next April, which will undoubtedly be a whole lot brighter than this one. We’ve already stopped any centralized April Fools efforts but realize there may be smaller projects within teams that we don’t know about. Please suss out those efforts and make sure your teams pause on any jokes they may have planned — internally or externally.”
Following Google, there were a lot of other companies that took to the internet to make jokes on April Fools day. You can check out the April fools jokes played by companies in 2019 here.