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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?"
Twitter seems to have gone down too
http://status.twitter.com/
Mass internet implosion?
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
My tweeters are not going through to the twitterwebmachine, I think the hour of the failwhale is upon us.
And to think I only spent 20 minutes this morning wondering what the fuck I managed to break this time...
Working fine for me again, btw. Whatever they broke seems fixed unless they're rolling it out in stages...
Patience...and a cell phone. I think we'll all live though it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
And now they are flooding G+ complaining about Twitter.
People, free services owe you nothing.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Comment removed based on user account deletion
M_Zuckerberg: These numbers don't look so good - be sure to inflate earnings by 10% before reporting!
big_CFO_man did not receive your chat.
If you're a business paying for the Google suite then they certainty do.
Jitsi's still up.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Nothing is free, if I was an advertiser who paid good money for mined twitter data or injected (sponsored) content I'd be pissed right now, let alone the users.
USENET was social networking
I have a hard time understanding why people would whine about an outage from a free service. As for "paying customers" -- what were you thinking? You're getting exactly what you paid for a cheap service level. This isn't Old Ma Bell. There is no non-carrier VoIP service has the service level of Ma Bell's wired network. .
Remember that "fast and cheap" is also = "prone to outage"
Or run your own prosody server, not the slightest bit hard to set up or maintain. To hell with this Google cloud based nonsense
Its a great service and costs precisely $0. I'm VERY happy with it.
No service I know of, including all the ones I've payed A LOT for, has a perfect record of 0 outages ever.
No, but nor do you owe them anything. You can still leave their services if you want. They want users for some reason, so if you leave, you're taking something they want. It obviously isn't much, but that's the extent of your implicit agreement.
"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.
I believe you're mistaking Google Talk for Google Voice.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
productivity shot wayyyy up!
users of the downed cloud service
cloud service
Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy, Slashdot (and I'm looking at you, alphadogg). Since when did chat services become "Cloud Services"?
Is IRC a "CLOUD Service"? Is AOL Instant Messenger a "Cloud Service"? Are MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger "Cloud Services"?
XMPP is a "Cloud" protocol? Yes? Yes?
People..its free services, get back to work and do your jobs and stop screwing around on the twitter thing
well slashdot of course.
If both Twitter and Google Voice are down, could this be an indication of some kind of backbone routing issue? Are any other sites affected?
That doesn't mean you can't complain. It means there is no one at the companies that you have issue with to complain to directly.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
"Dad, you were yelling numbers in your sleep again!"
"Son, let me tell you of the Rant snowball of 2012. It started with google talk. The complaining spilled over to twitter. After twitter went down, we all knew it was coming. Facebook, blogs, it kept going downhill. People logged into services they forgot existed to complain, MSN, YAHOO messenger! It was madness.
I only survived by ranting to a spam bot on ICQ, a time before names, '458253 can you hear me! 458253 It's all down! 458253 I highly doubt you're a Nigerian prince!!!!'"
People owe "free" services nothing in return.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
have you not heard of Google Smirk and the competing service, Grinner?
(oops, let the cat out of the bag, dident I?)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
At least they're using G+ for *something*, right?
+1 Disagree
RIMMER runs out of the room. Close up of LISTER's face... with no sign of life. RIMMER walks back in.
RIMMER: Er, perhaps you didn't catch that. I said SCRAMBLE!
LISTER: (Still half asleep) Yeah, that'll be great with bacon and beans, man. (Lays his head back onto pillow.)
RIMMER: Look, Starbug is a blazing inferno, the engine room is waist deep in rocket fuel and we're being attacked off the starboard bow by an unidentified craft!
CAT: (Appearing from under the covers on the other bunk.) Really?!
RIMMER: No, of course not really. It's a drill. We're pretending that Starbug is on fire and under attack.
LISTER: And I'm pretending to scramble, man. (Moves his hands up and down in scrambling motion whilst still on the bunk.)
RIMMER: Look, you've got 30 seconds to get out of bed or I'm declaring you officially dead.
RIMMER leaves the room.
LISTER: Good, then we can rest in peace.
I'm 6 seasons and 2 episodes into the X-files at a rate of about 3 episodes per day on Netflix AND I arrived at work today to find 1 motherboard and 2 power supplies in 3 manager or department heads' PCs were fried due to a power outage AND Twitter and Google Talk are down. So obviously, combining all those pieces of evidence, there's an electricity monster loose in the US power grid.
If you look at the Twitter status page, it says Twitter Site Issue - 2 hours ago with a short description. Then under that, there's a button to tweet that message. How? lol. But wait, 3,704 people somehow retweeted it according to the counter....WTF?!?!?!?! There are 3,704 magical Twitter wizards, hackers, or people plugged into The Matrix at the moment apparently. Now they just need to find out which one of them used their dark magic to crash Twitter lol.
So if anyone using the service actually cared to look at the SLA, they would see what Google actually promises. http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html still over 99% at this moment. so paying customers only get 3 free days of service. everyone that is complaining on twitter probably doesn't pay, so they don't get anything anyways.
We use (paid for) Google Apps at work, to provide us with all the basic tools our employees need: mail, calendar, documents, and last, but most definitely not least, chat.
The company is divided over multiple countries, most of those in the same time zone. GTalk has been acting funny for the past 24 hours (messages not going through, having to kill the phone app so the browser one would work, etc), but around lunch time today (Europe) things went south.
To give you an idea, most people here _only_ use GTalk to communicate with others on other sites. Calling is invasive (ironic for a VoIP company), and not everyone has each other's number (nobody but a few know about the company-wide directory), email is easier to miss, and not handy for quick one liners.
As soon as GTalk went down, we simply fired up another VM and installed the hybrid ircd, and qwebirc client. It only took two emails to get everyone organised in the proper (team-based) channels, and enforced people to use their regular login so people could /msg each other easily. I believe a few teams are actually considering keeping irc as a more permanent solution, considering the ease with which they can communicate as a single team, which is still a massive pain with GTalk.
All that, to say, some companies pay for GTalk, and actually rely on it. If it weren't for our ability to create a semi-viable alternative quickly, I'm guessing a lot of pain would have ensued.
Oh, and before you mention Skype: Fuck 'em.
As they say, "if you aren't paying for it, then you are the product."
When we're the product, we should all demand a high quality service as payment.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Its not like this is the first time its been down or anything. If your business model is tied to twitter never going down, you deserve to go bankrupt.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
It's not just Google Talk. This morning around 4 AM I could not reach most of the west coast reliably. I could get to Google (search) mostly, but all kinds of sites and services I wanted were unavailable. The traceoute from Washington D.C. stopped about 12 miles to the west at an above.net router.
MSN had an outage message this morning.
I am possibly the only /. user to notice this.
I typed Google in to Google.
Sorry for breaking the internet.
The tubes are clogged. We put too much stuff through them!