UPDATE: As of around 1:00, Gchat appears to be returning sporadically for some. The company’s G Suite Dashboard is also showing no disruptions in Google Hangout service.

———ORIGINAL STORY BELOW——–
Are you feeling a bit disconnected, lonely even? You aren’t the only one: folks using Google Chat/Google Hangouts — known by its users as Gchat or G-chat — are reporting that the feature appears to be down.

Consumerist noticed it in our virtual offices around 12:20 p.m. ET — though not everyone has had issues — and started seeing other folks complaining about the lack of chat on Twitter shortly after.

DownDetector.com shows a spike in problems starting around 12:28 p.m. ET:

And the outage heat maps shows a bunch of issues concentrated in large metropolitan areas on both coasts as well as in the Midwest:

We reached out to Google to see if there’s any more information on the situation and will update this post when we hear back. In the meantime, everyone hold on, we can make it through this together — and with the help of StrongBad.

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