Skip to footer

Gchat down: Major outage hits Google services

Hangouts and Google Sheets appear to be also affected by the problem. 

|
AP
A Google logo is displayed at the headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google is developing a Project Tango tablet according to reports.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Google is looking into an outage that appears to have affected many users of its chat services. 

In a statement provided to TechCrunch, the company said that it had received "reports of an issue with Google+ Hangouts," and that it would "provide more information shortly." Google's Apps Status Dashboard shows orange for Google Hangouts and Google Talk – a color that indicates service disruptions on the platforms. Google Sheets, a spreadsheeting application, appears also to be affected. 

As is often the case when one social media tool goes offline, the disgruntled masses took to other networks to complain. "Using #AIM for the first time in maybe 6-10 years," one user wrote. 

And the New York Observer tweeted that "Gchat is down. Are you going to a. get some work done for once or b. complain about it on Twitter?" (Judging by the sheer volume of angry Twitter posts, the answer is b.) 

As of 2:30 p.m. Eastern, Google's chat platforms appeared to be slowly coming back to life, although plenty of users remained unable to access Hangouts and Talk. 

In related news, Google announced this month that it updated the Gmail iOS app to support background refresh, meaning, as the company put it in a blog post, "your Gmail messages will be pre-fetched and synced so they’re right there when you open the app – no more annoying pauses while you wait for your inbox to refresh."

In order to access the new features, you'll need to have iOS 7 installed on your Apple device. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Gchat down: Major outage hits Google services
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2014/0317/Gchat-down-Major-outage-hits-Google-services
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe