Outage: Google Talk down for 5 hours

Google Talk, the popular chat service suffered a major outage on Thursday. The reason for the outage has not been ascertained yet, but the service was restored after almost 5 hours. Google had been updating its users about the steps it was taking to get a grip on the situation.

The series of updates started from 4:10 PM and lasted till 8:55 PM (IST). The search engine giant informed the users that it was investigating on the issue. Before the final update, the situation went up and it was alright.

The instant messages seemed to go back and forth very slowly. The chats were delivered to the contacts, but the users were receiving messages stating the contact did not get the chat.

The outage was known to exist when users found that they were not able to send messages to others who are online. Tweets followed confirmed that the issue was global. Twitter was filled with messages like “#Gchat is down, #Twitter confirms it”, “Grr argh #gchat is broken” and so on.

Did you experience the outage? Tell us in the comments section below.