If your business (or life) revolves around GoogleTalk, you were in for a rude surprise last week.

GoogleTalk, Twitter, Salesforce, Microsoft Azure…each went down for hours on-end, globally.

The Google Talk IM and video chat service suffered a massive global outage beginning early on Thursday, leaving users mum for more than four hours.

The Chocolate Factory’s application status page first noted the problem at 3:40am PST, describing it as a “service disruption.” Google updated that status to a “service outage” ten minutes later.

“We’re aware of a problem with Google Talk affecting a majority of users,” Google engineers wrote in a status update. “The affected users are able to access Google Talk, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior.”

The search giant continued to publish hourly updates, though no cause for the outage was identified.

By 7:50am, Google claimed to have restored at least partial service, saying it expected “a resolution for all users in the near future.”

Meanwhile, GTalk users have reacted in expected ways. They have rubbed their eyes, yawned, stretched … and taken to venting their frustrations on Twitter.

via Google Talk goes dumb in massive global outage • The Register.