Google apologizes for Google Talk outage

Recently, Google’s popular chat service, Google Talk, suffered a worldwide outage. Confused, users had taken to the popular microblog Twitter with messages such as, "#Gchat is down, #Twitter confirms it", "Grr argh #gchat is broken", and "So it seems #gchat is down across the world. Numerous tweets on it. Are you facing this problem?".

In its first message that Google posted after the outage, it confirmed that it was investigating the issue, and would provide more information soon. In a later update, Google added, "We're aware of a problem with Google Talk affecting a majority of users. The affected users are able to access Google Talk, but are seeing error messages and/ or other unexpected behavior. We will provide an update by 7/26/12 5:20 PM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change."

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Google apologizes for the GTalk outage

Google's GTalk service is the most popular chat service available today, and a disruption such as this is bound to cause much inconvenience to its wide userbase globally. The service can also be accessed via Gmail, one of the most popular e-mail services today. Google has put up an official notice confirming the issue.

Previously, the popular video-calling service Skype caused users discomfort as a strange bug was found sending instant messages to the wrong people on a user's contact list. Skype later confirmed the bug was sending random messages to wrong contacts. The bug was brought to light when users discovered it, and went on to post the strange occurrence on Skype's Support Network. Addressing the issue, Skype wrote, "Based on recent Skype customer forum posts and our own investigation over the past couple of days, we have identified a bug that we are working hard to fix".

Elaborating further on the bug, Skype explained, "This issue occurs only when a user's Skype client crashes during a Skype IM session, which may in some cases result in the last IM entered or sent prior to the crash being delivered to a different IM contact after the Skype client is rebooted or logged in as a new user". Skype soon began rolling out the first batch of patches of a hotfix for the bug. In an official post on Skype Garage, Skype confirmed this by saying, "rolling out a hotfix over the next few days for multiple Skype clients to address a couple of known issues".