<p>Google's real-time chat services, including Hangouts in Google+, Gmail, went down today, in an outage that appears to be fairly widespread. Messages in Gmail's chat integration are receiving system messages saying "[User] did not receive your chat" or simply not showing up, while in Google+ a loading animation with "Things are taking longer than expected" is showing in the Hangouts chat tab. On mobile, we're authentication errors signing into the service.</p><p>So far, Google hasn't changed the status of the service in its Apps Status Dashboard [update: now changed to "Service Disruption"], but we've reached out to the company to see if they can provide any more info about the problem and when we might expect service restoration.</p><p>Some report not seeing any issues, so this outage may be limited in scope, but reports from Twitter and from other sources confirm the service interruption extends to a considerable group of users.</p><p>UPDATE: Google provided the following statement regarding the outage -</p><p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/google-hangouts-and-gmail-chat-go-down/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/google-hangouts-gmail-chat-experiencing-service-disruption-1440675">Google Hangouts and Gmail Chat Experiencing Service Disruption</a> (International Business Times UK)</p><p><a href="http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2014/03/17/gchat-outage-gchat-and-google-drive-are-down-for-users-photos/">GChat Outage: GChat and Google Drive Are Down for Users [Photos]</a> (BostInno)</p><p><a href="http://mashable.com/2014/03/17/gchat-google-drive-down/">Gchat, Google Drive Down for Some Users</a> (Mashable)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dS3RvcfAmOeHtQMu5iRIu2RC_DMWM&authuser=0&ned=us">31 additional articles.</a></p>