Future Tense

There’s No Drama Quite Like the Drama of a Gchat Outage

So many feelings.

Screencap from Hangouts.

First of all, it’s not even called Gchat—it’s called Hangouts now. But in the throws of an outage, the language gets sloppy and the feelings come out. Google Plus Hangouts and in-Gmail chat were down for almost three hours between roughly noon and 3 p.m. EST today. The spreadsheet function in Google Drive was also out for awhile. People did not handle it well.

At 2:11 p.m. Google acknowledged the outage and directed users to the Apps Status Dashboard for up-to-date reports.

But that didn’t stop the feelings of hysteria from bubbling to the surface.

As the service began to return, the people rejoiced.

Then a contemplative mood fell over the crowd.

Though we’ve seen it before, it’s pretty amazing to watch a chat service outage disrupt an otherwise normal day. Okay, back to work (or Hangouts). It’s been an emotionally draining time.