Google Talk, the US tech giant's messaging and telephony service, was
knocked offline Thursday for unknown reasons, but was restored after more than four hours, the company said.
A Google status page said the service appeared to be malfunctioning around 1040 GMT, with the outage continuing more than three hours later.
"We're aware of a problem with Google Talk affecting a majority of users," the status page said. After various intermediate updates, at 1525 GMT, Google said, "The problem with Google Talk should be resolved," but offered no additional details.
With users left frustrated by the downtime of their preferred Instant Messaging service, no explanation was forthcoming from Google on the reasons of the downtime, or why it took so long to restore services.
Just as Google Talk started working normally, Twitter
became inaccessible for users around the globe. The social-networking company was quicker to react, fixing the problem in around an hour.
Twitter was also more open about communicating to the users afterwards what caused the outage,
blaming it on a freak double failure in its data centers.
Internet users are hoping for of an uneventful Friday ahead of the London 2012 opening ceremony later in the day, during which Internet traffic is expected to hit record peaks.
With inputs from AFP