Google Hangouts, Gmail Chat and Google Spreadsheets Go Down | Hacker News Reader

Google Hangouts, Gmail Chat and Google Spreadsheets Go Down

techcrunch.com

86 pointsDerekH38 comments

So the status page ( http://www.google.com/appsstatus ) mentions that Hangouts isn't covered by an SLA. Is that still true if you bought one of the Chromebox for Meetings which when discussed sounded like it used the same infrastructure?

Or are those Hangouts actually Google Talk and not G+ Hangouts? And how stupid is it that that is something resembling a decent question?

Talk is still covered in the SLA, Hangouts is not.

Don't ask me to explain what PHB came up with that logic.

Just got an email from Google on my grandfathered free Apps account encouraging me to upgrade to "ensure 99.9% uptime". Excellent timing, guys.

30 minutes out of a year is less than .1%

Same here. Coincidence? I think not. They even added details about how much Drive data I have, a passive threat that it might not be safe if I don't cough up for the paid account.

Same: "Get 99.9% guaranteed uptime for Gmail and other business features"

Very poor timing.

Amusingly, with Hangouts down, Skype video chats have become unusable. Time to move to Jitsi[1]?

[1] https://jitsi.org/

The nice thing about WebRTC is that video chat services have exploded. I've been using https://appear.in/ lately. It couldn't be simpler to start group video chats.

How do these typically compare to Skype or Hangouts in terms of video and sound quality?

From a subjective standpoint: perfectly.

From a technical standpoint: I believe Hangouts is moving to WebRTC soon as well.

What about from a security standpoint? How safe are these web applications, and how confident can I be they're not logging audio or video from my calls? I'm not talking about government intelligence security, I'm talking about not appearing in my pajamas on the pirate bay.

If both parties can get a raw socket in, then it's peer to peer... otherwise it's via proxy.

I would say, you always have to trust the service provider. While you can manually verify a direct end-to-end connection etc., web apps could always easily change, without user notice. Well, but that's also true for any proprietary app that isn't open source and code-reviewed.

It could be a browser feature in the future to sandbox those webcam data so that it's only transfered to a specific opponent. That has some problems to solve and is just a raw thought.

for those like me :) to whom it's not obvious: how come?

Skype is from Microsoft and Hangouts is from Google, right?!

Thank you for your patience in the face of my utterly stunning cluelessness.

High time, if you value privacy (use ZRTP). Or open standards.

I also don't seem to be able to open some documents in Google drive or have full functionality.

Same here, Google Sheets are misbehaving for me but Docs mostly seem ok. Gmail is working.

I'm actually also having problems with Facebook. I loaded up HN to see if others were experiencing the same thing.

I was about to throw my keyboard at the wall because a critical Sheet of mine was failing. Ugh, this is the downside to the cloud...

Gchat has been down for me for over an hour. I don't ever remember a google service being out for that long.

So here's something interesting: http://i.imgur.com/5ek8L9X.png

When I send or receive an email, it's exactly 1 hour behind. Wonder if it's related.

Most likely just messed up timezones. It's the season for that (we're in the magical 3 week or so period where DST is applied in the US but not yet in Europe).

That's a valid guess but we're seeing it intermittently in the office which is why I raised it.

For a brief moment, just a brief moment, I thought they are shutting them down.

While Google does shut down services all the time, they do typically give a few months warning first.

Here in my company we had the same problem and we are using http://practiceconversation.com as alternative, nobody uses this site, so it is nice so far.

To quote Adventure Time's Lemon Grab, "unacceptable"!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIZbGSXeWWE

Does Google provide a status page for their services?

http://www.google.com/appsstatus

thanks. i've actually never seen this before.

does the status appear as orange semi-circles for anyone else? it looks intentional based on the source, but semi-circles are not in the legend at the bottom. wonder if it's based on how long it's been down, or the number of affected instances or something else...

Semi-circle = issue is not fully resolved yet.

Yes very annoying especially when paying them, also Outlook.com was having issues too :(

and blockchain.info is down too

About to be the most productive day for me in awhile.

Where are all the SREs now? Cowering in fear.

The Voice page was down shortly as well.

I'm able to get forwarded calls but not make calls from the service.

Works for me.

Same.

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