Google Talk goes dumb in massive global outage

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 …

[wowfood]

correction

"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." ®

Should be

"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 not to come back." ®

I mean honestly who sits at work, has a problem that legitimately allows them to slack off, and actually want that problem to go away?

[Anonymous Coward]

But silence

But silence is golden.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh God

Oh God, Oh God what's happening, what am I to do, Google Talk is not working, is this the end of the world?

God replies,

'I'll give you the same advice I gave when Twitter went down, Get A Life You Twat!'

[Phil O'Sophical]

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...

[Terry Barnes]

Re: WTF?

I think you miss the point - in the US, lots of people use Google Talk as their primary phone system. If your office depends on talking to people, work stops.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

[hexx]

and now twitter is down - what's going on?

[bluest.one]

> and now twitter is down - what's going on?

It's clearly the apocalypse the Mayans were talking about.

[hexx]

that made my day, thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

"...apocalypse..."

Yup. Imagine if access to all these social networks was cut for half a day, and throw in general failure of the mobile networks. You'd find that a substantial portion of the younger population would suddenly have to look up and deal with the world as it really is (something many of them may never have had to do before). I find the prospect quite scary.

[Justicesays]

Re: "...apocalypse..."

"You'd find that a substantial portion of the younger population would suddenly have to look up and deal with the world as it really is (something many of them may never have had to do before). I find the prospect quite scary."

Might even be riots in the street.

Except without BBM, Facebook and Twitter rioters couldn't possibly organize themselves.

Plus the destructive feedback loop of having nowhere to gripe about everything being down.

"Damn Facebook is down, I'll just send a Tweet complaining about it"

"What? Twitter is down too? I'll have to Google+ about both of them then"

"No Google+ either?! And no BBM?"

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" (Darth Vader style)

*phew*, I think we would be safe.

Might be an uptick in graffiti.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Justicesays (Re: "...apocalypse...")

Fair point. The nation should be safe from rioting (though riots have been popular at times even before social media).

Locally, though, it would be a different picture. We rarely come into contact with the local wildlife - electronic socialising seems to keep them in their rooms or anywhere they won't be disturbed by parents. I really would hate to see them all out and about, bored and annoyed.

[PeterM42]

This counts ........

.....as YET ANOTHER "cloud" failure.

Get used to it.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: This counts ........

Yep, that's clouds for you. Never around when you need 'em, always dumping on you at the least convenient moment.

[crashatau]

The real issue?

Normally when a large corporation has a large outage and doesn't explain why, you can generally put it down to "whoops, an engineer didn't understand what the word testing and staging mean"

I didn't even notice it was down, that is how much I use it!

Now if Steam was down I would believe the world had ended :p

[Terry Barnes]

Re: The real issue?

--Normally when a large corporation has a large outage and doesn't explain why, you can generally put it down to "whoops, an engineer didn't understand what the word testing and staging mean"--

Can you prove that or is it just a guess?

Sometimes it's because a company doesn't want to say "Company X's kit is crap", especially if court action is likely to result. Sometimes it's because there is an intrinsic flaw in design that they don't want to draw attention to. Sometimes it's because they've built something as cheap as possible and shit happens - that doesn't make for a great press release. Finally, sometimes it's down to black hat action and announcing that gives customers the heebeejeebees and they leg it.

Very few corporates have environments where an engineer, no matter how daft, can just release code or kit into production. Those annoying, anal people who refuse to even talk about your release unless its been tested three times in two environments, they're there to save the company. I've never worked anywhere I could circumvent that process - as a dev all I could do was push code to the testing platform and inform people it was ready for testing - even in an emergency, it's the same process operated more quickly.