Google Talk goes dumb in massive global outage
Users left speechless
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Updated The Google Talk IM and video chat service suffered a massive global outage beginning early on Thursday, leaving users mum for more than four hours.
The Chocolate Factory's application status page first noted the problem at 3:40am PST, describing it as a "service disruption." Google updated that status to a "service outage" ten minutes later.
"We're aware of a problem with Google Talk affecting a majority of users," Google engineers wrote in a status update. "The affected users are able to access Google Talk, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior."
The search giant continued to publish hourly updates, though no cause for the outage was identified.
By 7:50am, Google claimed to have restored at least partial service, saying it expected "a resolution for all users in the near future."
Meanwhile, GTalk users have reacted in expected ways. They have rubbed their eyes, yawned, stretched ... and taken to venting their frustrations on Twitter.
"GTalk's down," writes Twitter user @AlishaCoehlo. "Offices should send folks home. Employees aren't going to be doing much else than staring at screens, willing it to come back."
Google has now updated its app status dashboard claiming the issues have been resolved and apologised for the outage.
But a Google mouthpiece told The Reg that at this point it was unable to confirm the technical glitches. ®
COMMENTS
> and now twitter is down - what's going on?
It's clearly the apocalypse the Mayans were talking about.
Nexus 7
I was showing people my shiny new Nexus 7 and telling them how cool the video chat was with Google Talk - only to find it wouldn't log in. Typical - demos never go smoothly when you're trying to impress.
WTF?
> Offices should send folks home. Employees aren't going to be doing much else than staring at screens
Employees like that should be sent home permanently, with a P45* If they haven't got something else to do when their chat program goes away they're just wasting office space.
* For US readers, that's a piece of paper, not a weapon...
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