Sent a message to someone onGtalk and it got delivered to someone else? Wondering what happened? Hold, you are not the only one experiencing this bug. Many other users of Google's free instant messaging serviceGoogle Talk too have reported that messages are being delivered to unintended recipients on Gtalk.
In some cases the unintended recipients are multiple. Also, some Gtalk users have also complained of messages being delivered to people outside their contact lists.
Acknowledging the issue, Google said, "Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 9/26/13 4:30pm with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience. At this time Google Talk is not functioning correctly and we are continuing to work to restore full functionality."
Microblogging site Twitter is flooded with user comments on the same, says ?@SamreenSamad, "My Gtalk is randomly sending messages to multiple contacts. Can someone help please? I've changed my password and all that."
"Avoid gtalk. There's something wrong with it today. Seriously," reads another tweet from @devgoswami. Some tweets, like this one from @Monelle_b, also have an interesting warning, "Google's GTalk is sending chat messages to the wrong recipients. So be careful with office gossip."
So far, there seems no pattern to whom the message is wrongly getting delivered to. Also, it is not clear how many users have been affected affected by the bug.
Google is currently looking into the glitch. "Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. The issue has been resolved and all services are gradually returning to normal. We will update when full service is restored," reads the update on Google App dashboard.
Earlier this week, Google's Gmail service apologized to users who were affected by email delivery delays on September 23. Wrote Sabrina Farmer, senior site reliability engineering manager for Gmail, in post on the Google Gmail Blog," On September 23rd, many Gmail users received an unwelcome surprise: some of their messages were arriving slowly, and some of their attachments were unavailable. We'd like to start by apologizing—we realize that our users rely on Gmail to be always available and always fast, and for several hours we didn't deliver."
Regarding the reason for delay, Sabrina added, "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."