Hangouts flameout bringing the Google blame out

Google says it has now resolved the issues that caused its Hangouts meeting service to go down earlier today.

A notice posted to the Hangouts Status Page says that as of 11:30am US Pacific time, the problems that had left some users unable to connect to the service were resolved.

This after Google spent much of the morning scurrying to address the outage for its cloud communications platform. The Chocolate Factory has not provided details on what exactly was wrong with the service, other than to say that it was experiencing "latency and loading issues."

Similarly, monitoring service Down Detector showed a large spike this morning in user reports of problems with Hangouts.

In particular, users noted that the desktop versions of Hangouts were not working, while in some cases they could still access the service via their mobile devices.

Down Detector's map showed that by noon US Pacific time, the issue was clearing up for much of the US, though complaints were still trickling in around major cities on both coasts. Users on Twitter also took note of the outage:

Whuddaya mean Google Hangouts is down? pic.twitter.com/HGTcDMmSqG

— Pebble (@Pebble) October 25, 2016

Google Hangouts is down so basically my day should just be over right?

— Jennifer Marie (@notajenny) October 26, 2016

Womp, womp.

No texting for me today! Google hangouts is downhttps://t.co/orgFgffwQZ pic.twitter.com/u6Jg6f3maj

— Jason Inquires (@jasoninquires) October 26, 2016

The outage lasted over a period of about 2-3 hours from between 9:00am and 11:30am US Pacific time.

In August, Hangouts had a similar problem that left users unable to access the service for a time. ®