The city’s digitally-active crowds were among those who were stunned at the worldwide faux pas on Thursday after a bug in Google Talk, a popular online instant messaging service, forwarded personal messages to unintended recipients.
A Twitter storm erupted around noon with many users taking to the micro-blogging network to warn people that Google Talk was acting funny in a way that could potentially damage people’s reputations.
“Gtalk is sending messages I type for one person to another person. Creepy as hell,” tweeted Bangalore-based K. Ranjani(@_tharkuri). The Tamil girl is a popular blogger with a big list of followers from the city.
Twitter was abuzz with similar complaints — a few of them detailing personal faux pas — from across the world.
“Omg! My gchat messages to my husband are popping up on my friend’s window too,” read one tweet.
Many users contacted Google administrators on the Google Products Forum with questions on the issue. Google officially posted their responses on App Status Dashboard where, by way of three messages over three hours, they went from ‘investigating reports’ to ‘issue resolved’.
At the time of writing this article, there was no official explanation on the bug, or how many people were affected or why services were not shut down during the duration.
