Twitter, Google Talk suffer massive outages

Posted by Randy Shulman
July 26, 2012 2:34 PM |

Both Twitter and Google Talk are having a spot of trouble today.

Starting with the Twittering Blue Bird, USA Today's Technology live has been following the service's global outage with a religious fervor. The bird seems to have come back to life -- not unlike Mimi in Rent or E.T. -- and is now busily chirping away.

Google Talk, on the other hand, has had slightly more severe issues. It "went down hard this morning," reported Don Reisinger at CNET. In fact, it may have been earlier than that as my access to the service was cut off at 10 p.m. Wednesday, July 25.

In its report, CNET noted:

Earlier this morning, Google had announced on the dashboard that it was "investigating reports of an issue" with its chat service, and called it a "service disruption." Just 10 minutes later, the company updated the status to a service outage, saying that it was "affecting a majority of users." "The affected users are able to access Google Talk, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior," Google wrote on its dashboard.
While it does seem to be back, third party programs -- such as the normally reliable and sensational Mailplane -- are still having trouble accessing Google Talk, displaying the following disparaging message where the cheerful names and icons usually appear:

Oops. Your chat connection may have been interrupted.

With all this downage, global conversations and chats abruptly ended in mid-sentence/tweet/chat. It was, one could almost say, "rude."

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