Missing Vowels from Gmail Login Page

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I was just about to log in to check my mail from a lesser-used email account in Gmail when I suddenly stopped dead on my tracks. The Gmail login page looked as if it was written in txt language! wch mns tht th txt lkd lkd ths. And of course I kind of panicked, because I thought that maybe was internet browser was hijacked or Gmail or Google (gasp!) was hijacked by Chinese hackers in retaliation (a whole big backstory to that) or both. Usually I don't give much thought to the rest of the stuff on the logon page when I sign in to my email accounts. So this incident made me make a mental note to be more cautious the next time I log in... not just on email accounts but on other sites as well where you're required to sign in. Anyway, back to my story, i checked out the Gmail blog just to be sure. It turns out that Gmail is suffering from a "vowel outage", which arose from a failure in one of their frontend web servers in a datacenter to render the letter 'a', which then lead to subsequent failures in other datacenters servers. To prevent the rendering failure from spreading to other datacenters, Gmail tried to limit the damage to the letters a,e,i,o,u, and so the only letters rendered on their site are the consonants. Now that's a perfect April Fools coming from Gmail, don't you think?