Lakhs across the country had a harrowing time on Thursday following a major technical snag in the Google network affecting Google chat and Gmail operations. Those using Google Talk could not log-in to their accounts from afternoon, and even if they did, they could not chat.
Google first described the problem as a “service disruption”, but later up-graded it to “service outage” as more and more people complained of failure to access GTalk. “We are continuing to investigate this issue,” the firm said in its Google applications dashboard. By night, the service was restored for some.
With GTalk down, netizens resorted to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to exchange views. “The Great Google Talk Outage of ’12 continues,” said a Twitter post. “Google Talk is not translating into Google Action,” quipped another. India has the highest percentage of Gmail users in the world with a little over 60 per cent of netizens using it. About three million people use Google services in the country. Complaints on social networking sites about GTalk’s failure ranged from disappearance of contacts to failed logins. Several tweets revealed that the problem was felt in many other countries too. Incidentally, Twitter too experienced a site shutdown on the same day.