Google's instant messaging service, Google Talk which is also known as Hangouts (after the transition), is experiencing serious privacy issues, with a number of users complaining that messages are being received by the wrong recipients.
A number of people are reporting these issues on several platforms, including Google's product forums and Twitter. Both Google Talk users and users who have updated to Hangouts, the new version of the chat service, are said to be experiencing the problems, with messages reaching multiple people, or people the messages are not targeted at, and at times to some other recipient's email ID. Some users have even reported that chat messages are going out to people who're not in their contact list as noted by
The Verge.
To check whether your messages were only delivered to people they were intended for, you can go to the Chats section and have a look at the chat history.
Google's Apps Status Dashboard
confirms that the service is experiencing issues, and that the team in charge is continuing to investigate this issue though it's been resolved.
At the time of writing this post, the status page mentions, "We will provide an update by 9/26/13 6:00 PM with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience. The issue has been resolved and all services are gradually returning to normal. We will update when full service is restored."
The issue comes a day after Google
apologised for delays in email delivery on Gmail, explaining that the message delivery delays on Monday were triggered by a dual network failure that reduced Gmail's capacity to deliver messages to users. The issues lasted up to 11 hours for some users.
It also shared some statistics on affected messages informing that almost 71 percent messages were unaffected and had no delay, while out of the remaining 29 percent, the average delivery delay was just 2.6 seconds. However, about 1.5 percent of messages were delayed more than two hours. Also, users who attempted to download large attachments on affected messages encountered errors.