Google Talk (GTalk) severe outage.. July 2012

Google Talk (GTalk) service restored

Google’s instant messaging service, popularly known as GTalk (Google Talk, or GChat) has been restored after suffering what seem like a massive worldwide service disruption  lasting over four hours yesterday (Thursday 26th July 2012)
A big cheer went up across the office, staff mood index jumped 30 percentage points and productivity peaked for the rest of the day. (The backup trial of skype service was abandoned pretty quickly once Gtalk had restored service). 
According to Google, the GTALK service resumed at 4.25 pm (BST). However, no news on the cause nor how widespread the impact. 

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Its not until a free web service that you use goes down that you realize how integrated it had become within your work processes and that of your organisation. Active Online is an early adopter of new technologies and we tend to become evangelical about those that provide efficiencies, improve productivity and work practices. 


GTalk  (Google Talk or Google Chat) is one such free service that we use every minute of every day to quickly send  files, links, updates, work-orders, change requests, , company alerts, news and gossip within the office and more importantly how we link effectively with remote workers, collaborators and clients during project development. 

So with the recent GTalk outage, productivity was definitely impacted and individually the impact seemed to cause real emotional disturbance to individuals something akin to the type of pain and inconvenience (and isolation) of loosing one's smartphone during an emergency situation.  Some semblance of normality was restored by the emergency installation of Skype services, however productivity remained below average and moods affected....








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