Google Scrambles To Restore Google Talk From Outage

alphadogg writes "Google Talk, a desktop and mobile text and voice chat service used by many Google Gmail customers, suffered a widespread outage Thursday morning that the company said was affecting 'a majority of users.' The outage, first reported by Google a little before 7am eastern time, was being restored about 4 hours later, according to Google. Meanwhile, users of the downed cloud service took to Twitter and other avenues to voice their displeasure." Update: 07/26 16:24 GMT by T : wiedzmin writes "It looks like Twitter is experiencing an outage. leaving users unable to access the site on Thursday morning. I wonder if it's related to the Google Talk outage at all, but one thing is for sure — this has stopped a slew of complaints about Google Talk on Twitter. If Twitter is down, where do you tweet about that?"

Comments

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter being down is not news!

It's just Grand Central

[Animats]

"Google Voice" is just a rebranded Grand Central. Google hasn't done much with it since they bought it. Users have been screaming about the same bugs on the forums for years. The SMS side of Google Voice has been especially flaky. Google Voice gets their phone numbers from some low-end third party telco in Northern California that doesn't seem to be properly plugged in to the system that tells other telcos about the numbers and their properties (cell/landline, etc.).

Google Voice doesn't have an API. There's hack code to talk to Google Voice from programs. It doesn't work too well, because the interface to Voice is (perhaps by intent) API-hostile. If you're using Google Voice for anything serious, get a pay service like Twilio. You pay a few cents per message, but it actually works and there's customer support.