Users of Google’s instant messaging service (also known as GTalk) on Wednesday complained that the messages sent using the popular chat services were being delivered to the wrong recipients. Some users even found their messages being delivered to their bosses leading to some embarrassing moments. “There was an issue today that affected some people using Google’s instant messaging services. We have since identified the problem, stopped it from recurring, and are currently applying a fix. We’re very sorry to anyone affected,” said a Google spokesperson. To see if messages are being delivered to the right recipients, users should check their chat history on the Gmail. Google’s product forums were flooded with complaints by users. “We use it at work too, so confidential info could have been exposed,” wrote one concerned user. Another user wrote: “My chat has gone to one of my other friends and his chat has gone to one of his friends. And his friend has posted the content on our batch mail. It was public humiliation.” A third users, Mohit said, “It is big security threat. Kindly fix this issue.” Some users took to Twitter to warn others about the glitch in the GTalk. The complaints started appearing on Twitter close to noon on Thursday and continued till evening. On Monday, Gmail had apologised its users for slow delivery of emails and some of the attachments being unavailable. “We’d like to start by apologising — we realise that our users rely on Gmail to be always available and always fast, and for several hours we didn’t deliver,” wrote Sabrina Farmer, senior site reliability engineering manager for Gmail. The company had said that the message delivery delays were triggered by a dual network failure. This is a very rare event in which two separate, redundant network paths both stop working at the same time, it had said. Some mails were delayed more than two hours. Google is in the process of migrating its various IM and audio/video chat services to a new one called Hangouts, which will replace Google Chat, Google Talk and Google Plus Messenger.
