Thousands of netizens across India virtually let down following a major technical snag in the Google network affecting Google chat and Gmail operations

By Syed Akbar
Hyderabad, July 26: Thousands of netizens across the country were
virtually let down on Thursday following a major technical snag in the
Google network affecting Google chat and Gmail operations. Right from
afternoon, those using Google Talk, an instant messaging service,
could not login to their account, and even if they succeeded, they
could not chat with their friends.

Google, which first described the problem as a “service disruption”
later upgraded it to “service outage” as more and more people
complained of failure to access their G Talk. “We are continuing to
investigate this issue,” Google said in its Google applications
dashboard. By night, the service was restored for some users.

With the Google Talk down, netizens are forced to use Twitter and
Facebook to exchange views. Unlike Google chat, which is a private
affair, Twitter and Facebook are social networking sites, where
postings are public.

India has the highest percentage of Gmail users in the world with a
little over 60 per cent of netizens using it. In terms of numbers,
about three million people use the Google services in the country.

Complaints on social networking sites about G Talk failure ranged from
disappearance of contacts to failed logins. Postings on Twitter
revealed that the problem is felt in several countries including India.

The outage dominated on Twitter with users coming out with a number of
comments. “The Great Google Talk Outage of 2012 continues,” says a
post. “Google Talk is not translating into Google Action,” adds
another user.

That the sudden outage had turned many netizens crazy can be seen from
some of the comments: A user John Stephens noted, “Neither zombie
attacks nor crazy pastors had me as convinced of the impending
apocalypse as Google Talk being down”.