Is Google Talk Down? After Problems Persist For 3 Hours, Google Is ‘Continuing To Investigate The Issue’

Google has confirmed that its Google Talk service has been experiencing outages around the globe. The most recent status update from the company states that the Google team is "continuing to investigate the issue."

Some users have been able to connect to the service but cannot send messages, while others are completely incapable of accessing their contacts list or sending messages. According to TheNextWeb, Android services are being affecting by this bug also. Some reported issues include problems with Android syncing and intermittent Push support.

The issue affecting Google Talk has been so widespread that the company was forced to officially report that the instant messaging platform is experiencing a "Service Outage." The issue progressed from a "Service Disruption" orange alert at 6:40 a.m. to a full "Service Outage" notification only 10 minutes later.

"We're aware of a problem with Google Talk affecting a majority of users," an update at 6:50 a.m. on Thursday read. "The affected users are able to access Google Talk, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior."

But users can still use social media outlets such as Twitter to communicate, which is where some confused and disgruntled Google Talk patrons went to voice their concerns.

"Wow, I never realized how completely dependent on Google Talk I was until right now," user Russell Holly, a writer for website Geek.com, posted on Twitter.

"Seems like Google Talk is down. Now we have to internally phone each other again to communicate. Blegh, talking!" web programmer Martin Benjamins tweeted on Thursday morning.

Currently, the service has been down for nearly two and a half hours. There haven't been many recent reports of the service experiencing outages, but a user did report in February that his or her account was down for an entire week. In April another user reported that he or she recieved an "Error 404" message and was unable to use Google Talk.

Google Talk is an instant messaging service which provides both text and voice communication, and was initially released in 2005. It has since been rated one of the best instant messaging applications for the Android operating system, according to Gizmodo.

Google has said that another update on the status of the issue will be posted at 9:50 a.m.