The crash that appeared to be fairly widespread is the second in less than two months the Web giant’s popular email and instant-messaging offering.
Users in Bangladesh began to notice outage with Google Hangouts (also known as gTalk, GChat), Google Drive just after 10pm BdST Monday. By 10:30pm, Google had listed Google Talk and Google Hangouts as suffering “Service disruptions” on its Apps Status Dashboard, a lesser categorisation than “Service outages.”
Some users said Drive, Google’s cloud storage and office-applications suite, was also offline, but Google added only one component of that offering — Sheets, its spreadsheet service — to the list of affected services.
The instant-messaging service appeared to be healed for most users just before 2am BdST, roughly three hours after service was first interrupted.
“Google+ Hangouts service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future,” the company posted in a 01:15am BdST update.
Mashable said that earliest reports (noted via Twitter) had begun trickling in around 11pm BdST on Monday.
Messages in Gmail’s chat integration were receiving system messages saying “[User] did not receive your chat” or simply not showing up, while in Google+ a loading animation with “Things are taking longer than expected” is showing in the Hangouts chat tab, reported TechCrunch.
Meanwhile, Google has changed the status of the services in its Apps Status Dashboard to “No issues”.
Google webmail offering Gmail and its Google+ social network, the main homes for Hangouts, went down on Jan 24, when the service suffered two major outages over the course of two weeks, said Mashable.
The free email service had roughly 425 million monthly active users as of 2012, making it one of the leading webmail services in the United States, along with Yahoo and Microsoft’s Outlook (which was merged with Hotmail in 2013).
