UPDATE: Google says these issues should now be resolved.

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.

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.

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.

UPDATE: Google provided the following statement regarding the outage –

Hi there, We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google+ Hangouts. We will provide more information shortly. Please check the Apps Status Dashboard for further information: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status Thanks, The Press Team

UPDATE: Google Spreadsheets appear to be down, too, with users having trouble either accessing existing ones or creating new ones. Other Google Docs formats appear to be unaffected. UPDATE 2: Docs Spreadsheets appear to be back online for many who were experiencing problems.

UPDATE: Google has also addressed the outage with a Tweet from its official account, which is fairly casual in tone for such a lengthy down time –

Messaging is having a case of the Mondays. We're working on resolving the issue—see Apps Status Dashboard for updates http://t.co/B5Z6rxPvHb — Google (@Google) March 17, 2014

UPDATE 11:23 AM PT: Hangouts and Gchat appear to be working for many once again, around a couple hours after the outage first began. Let us know if you’re seeing service restored