Users of the popular Google Talk messenger in the afternoon on July 26, 2012 were waited by very unpleasant surprise — within 5 hours the service simply did not function. By the evening, work returned to normal, however official explanations about the cause of so serious failure from the Google management did not arrive. So users still need only to put forward own versions.
Chronology of events
At first in the accounts on Google Talk the users noticed terrible confusion — someone received the messages which are obviously addressed to other people to someone from interlocutors suddenly the own departures returned. First many "sinned" on viruses, malfunctions of communication and inadequacy of the correspondents. However it became soon clear that GTalk has problems.
Users around the world could still come into own accounts and even saw which of friends is online, however it was impossible to send and receive messages already. Soon the statuses from Google which confirmed existence of problems and promised their fast solution began to appear. However time went, and the situation did not change for the better. People expressed discontent on other websites. Soon Google Talk got to the rating of world trends of Twitter. It should be noted that after a while already also the microblogging service "fell". The operability of both popular resources was in full restored only by the evening.
Alleged causes of failure of Google Talk
Versions about the causes of failure began to move forward at once as problems came to light. The first version became "Olympic". It is reasonable to assume that many people around the world decided to discuss the opening of games which is coming at that time in London and in general the Olympic Games-2012. As a result service just did not sustain overloads.
Version number two is "hacker". According to information from network, allegedly at this particular time there took place a certain conference of hackers. The occurred failure could be caused by attempt of the last to involve attention of owners of GTalk to existing "holes" in service. And perhaps hacker attack was made by request of competitors of Google.
Version third is "paranoid". Some users remembered that similar confusion with sending messages happened in work of Skype. And soon after that began to publish messages in network that this popular service of VoIP-telephony allegedly began to spy on the users, and failures were caused just by completions, necessary for "espionage activity ", in the mechanism of functioning of service. Right there were appeals to change the messenger — to pass to ISQ, Jabber and other less known analogs to avoid espionage also from GoogleTalk.
If representatives of Twitter after resumption of work not only apologized, but also published detailed and very self-critical report on the cause of failures in system operation, then from Google of any "blamestorming session" did not act. In the final status the representatives of the company only apologized for the caused inconveniences, reported that work is adjusted, and advised users if they had any problems to contact directly support. On Twitter no explanations about the reasons of malfunctions in work of GTalk were published in the official Google account.
However, many users of the messenger about these not palatable five hours on July 26, 2012 already managed to forget.