It's funny that all people in my contact list were blaming their Internet connections. It never occurred to them this issue would be with Google Talk. I don't remember the last time this happened after using it for about 8 years now!
It seems like something related to Google+ integration.
Today, my real name and the location that I had had in Google+ is appearing as my Google Talk name and status rather than the old nick/status that I had set.
I mean that in the "genuine curiosity" sense, not the usual snarky xkcd sense. What do you know? Who do you know? Please elaborate.
Have they angered Midas and his mighty golden touch? Did they finally get enough of them down at the same time to where they couldn't bring any of them back up? Circular dependencies are fun that way.
I was on call the day of a cascading failure event some years ago for something not too different than this. They kept trying to blame my service, but it wasn't us. We were actually staying up despite the extra load being created by all of the thrashing. It turned out to be something else entirely.
Citation - I work at Google (in a much different area). It was actually a change rolled out to talk systems. I don't know what the change was yet but will get details and the system is recovering.
They used to have something similar back in the days of Orkut. The Orkut name would get set as the Google Talk name. People used to change their Orkut names a lot to say something "cool". Then suddenly they stopped syncing the accounts with Orkut and the name that you had on Orkut stuck.
Looks like it's back up now. Google did a good job with this!
Starting from 'investigating reports Google Talk down' and following right through till service is restored with hourly updates is something that Amazon (and others) could learn from.
I can't get on via the mobile client or on Google Plus, but I can sign in with an XMPP client or the web client on GMail.
If I send a message through XMPP, it appears in the chat window in GMail, so there's at least some actual connectivity happening. Messages aren't getting through or appearing in my logs though.
Edit: Messages are appearing in logs. My clients don't agree on who is online, though.
A few minutes ago it worked from Pidgin, now I reboot on Windows and try Google+ and nobody is online. Found it very weird, but this explains... Odd though that it says it's disrupted since 12:40PM and it worked under an hour ago (it's now 16:30 here).
Can anyone else confirm or deny that over the last 6 months, GTalk, at least in iChat/Adium has been getting worse and worse in terms of random disconnects.
I'll have days where it's stable, and I'll have days where it just disconnects/reconnects 10 ties an hour (on different networks that day).
