It’s unwise to rely on Google as a mission-critical means of communication. A lot of people are finding that out today:
Google Talk went down hard this morning, but is getting back up and running.
“The problem with Google Talk should be resolved,” Google wrote on its App Status dashboard at 8:25 a.m. PT. “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”
A top priority… sure. That explains why the outage is affecting more than fifty percent of Google Talk’s users.
There are better alternatives available. Skype is well-known, but there’s also open-source software like Ekiga that is more dependable.