Were you by any chance using Google’s popular Google Talk to chat with people earlier today? And were those conversations by any means “private” in nature? As in you might not want its content to be read by anyone else? Well according to (alarming) fresh reports coming in, there could have been a chance that those messages were delivered to a totally different recipient! This was due to a glitch that if we are going by accounts of users themselves lasted for a good five hours. Google has on its part acknowledged the problem and has recently updated its Apps Status Site to declare it “solved”.
While the App Status site just stated that Google Talk (now HangOuts) wasn’t “functioning properly”, the real issue seems to have been this erroneous re-routing of messages. Google has not confirmed this specific problem so far and is yet to say if many people were affected by this and whether this was a widespread issue. Google as you might be aware, is in the process of switching its entire userbase from Google Talk – which it introduced back in 2005 to its recent and supposedly more feature packed messaging application, “HangOuts”.
These are some of the tweets that went out from users when they started experiencing the issue.
Weird issue @google I am using gtalk for chatting and same messages are getting delivered to another friends’ profile.
— Madhuri Khanduja (@madhurikhanduja) September 26, 2013
Friendships will be ruined, hearts broken, jobs lost > RT @WiredUK: Gchat is sending messages to wrong recipients: http://t.co/IUNbUTZcIv
— Jessica Phelan (@JessicaLPhelan) September 26, 2013
This week seems to have not been particularly good one for Google services. Earlier, a bug that affected 50 percent of Google’s Gmail users resulted in delay of emails and attachment openings for over 10 hours. If that wasn’t all, yet another Gmail related bug caused people to get blacklisted and locked out of their own accounts if they tried to send an email with an in-line image attached!
Btw, Google just turned 15 and there is a new Google Doodle that you can play with. More on that soon!
