Google Scrambles To Restore Google Talk From Outage 85
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?"
Meanwhile (Score:5, Informative)
Twitter seems to have gone down too
http://status.twitter.com/ [twitter.com]
Mass internet implosion?
Re:Meanwhile (Score:4)
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Just fall back to IRC when Twitter dies.
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It all runs in "The Cloud".
So maybe someone tripped over the cable [xkcd.com]?
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Er... isn't twitter down? (Score:1)
My tweeters are not going through to the twitterwebmachine, I think the hour of the failwhale is upon us.
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Yup, Twitter's engineers are on it, apparently : http://status.twitter.com/ [twitter.com]
Re:Er... isn't twitter down? (Score:5, Insightful)
What else would they say? "our engineers are sitting on their collective asses and hoping this will soon resolve itself"?
Good to know... (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
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Re:Good to know... (Score:5, Funny)
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...
It is being phased in 140 bytes at a time.
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When software-related stuff just stops working after I've changed nothing, I usually assume it's the website that went down. It's a bit shocking that people "complained" about it. Phones do stop working from time-to-time. Even POTS only has 99.995% reliability not 100%.
Of course most people aren't logical..... there's a new photo going-round facebook that claims Obama made gas prices go down, and therefore we should re-elect him. Problem: Historical data shows prices went upward from ~$2.70 when th
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Really? I would think the typical comeback would be that has proved were at an all-time high (over $4) in early 2008, at the tail end of the Bush administration, and only dropped to $2.70 at the 2009 inauguration because of the big economic collapse we had. But I guess anyone still voting Republican must have a pretty short memory!
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>>>and only dropped to $2.70 at the 2009 inauguration
Except that the gas price actually dropped to $2.70 during the last year of Bush's presidency. For Obama or his supporters to take credit for something that happened before Obama set foot in office makes no sense.
It happens...have a backup (Score:4, Funny)
Patience...and a cell phone. I think we'll all live though it.
Re:It happens...have a backup (Score:4, Insightful)
What if your cell phone has a data-only plan and you rely on VOIP for your calls? :3
Re:It happens...have a backup (Score:5, Insightful)
What if your cell phone has a data-only plan and you rely on VOIP for your calls? :3
Then you lose a few nerd points for not having a backup system ready and waiting.
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If Google talk has been up for a couple years and if this is their first outage, well then I would say that they are the most reliable.
News just in "Angry twitterers" flood G+ with..... (Score:4, Insightful)
And now they are flooding G+ complaining about Twitter.
People, free services owe you nothing.
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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.
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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.
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People owe "free" services nothing in return.
Re:News just in "Angry twitterers" flood G+ with.. (Score:4, Funny)
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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 t
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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.
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No Big Deal (Score:1)
big_CFO_man did not receive your chat.
Jitsi (Score:2)
Jitsi's still up.
You know you're old when... (Score:5, Insightful)
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"
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It's worth pointing out that USENET never goes down. Your USENET server might go down, but you can use another one.
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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. .
Then again, neither does the current pile of LEC's (local exchange carriers). POTS or VOIP, they all still suck compared to the Ma Bell days. Then still again, we aren't paying almost a buck a minute for a cross-country phone call anymore either. Yes, young'n's, there was a time when that was the the case.
Use a proper XMPP service (Score:3)
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really? What are you expecting? (Score:3)
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.
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"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.
Meanwhile (Score:5, Funny)
productivity shot wayyyy up!
"Cloud Service" (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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A cloud in a topology is a networked group of computers. The internet was always referred to as a cloud in diagrams for this reason.
If you have more than one device at home, you have a private cloud (as viewed from the internet looking in.) The buzzword as used now is basically used to indicate running software on someone else's networked group of computers.
Where to post when twitter goes down...? (Score:1)
well slashdot of course.
Routing problem? (Score:2)
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?
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The Cloud (Score:1)
It's coming! (Score:5, Funny)
"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!!!!'"
you guys still use those old things? (Score:2)
have you not heard of Google Smirk and the competing service, Grinner?
(oops, let the cat out of the bag, dident I?)
SCRAMBLE, SCRAMBLE, all hands on deck! (Score:1)
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
This is the actual cause (Score:4, Funny)
WTF? (Score:3)
still greater than 99% up at this moment (Score:1)
Internet down, not Google (Score:4, Informative)
MSN was down as well. (Score:3)
MSN had an outage message this morning.
I am possibly the only /. user to notice this.
My fault (Score:3)
I typed Google in to Google.
Sorry for breaking the internet.
Too much stuff through the intertubes. (Score:2)
The tubes are clogged. We put too much stuff through them!