Google+ Hangouts went down, being restored now

Hangouts on Google+, Gmail, mobile apps & Chrome extension is currently seeing some downtime.

Loading Hangouts from the Google+ web interface currently shows a vague, unhelpful error message and those using the Chrome extension for Hangouts will get messages claiming that the recipient "isn't on Hangouts at the moment". Hundreds of users are already flooding the stream with similar reports, suggesting that the outage is widespread.

"Things are taking longer than expected"

As of writing, the Apps Status Dashboard for Google services hasn't been updated to reflect the downtime, but we'll continue to update this post when we hear more, or when the chat service is back online.

Error message on the Hangouts Chrome extension

Update: The Apps Status Dashboard has been updated. The Google Talk and Google+ Hangouts services are indeed down.

Update: As per a post from the YouTube's page, Google+ Hangouts is currently undergoing "Emergency Maintenance." The engineers are working on it now, and don't have an estimated time frame. We'll keep you in the loop.

Update: At 2:15 PM EDT, the Apps Status Dashboard is now reporting that Google Talk and Google+ Hangouts is restored for some users and should be up for all users "in the near future."

Are you currently affected by the Hangouts outage? Let us know in the comments section below!