A glitch in Google (News - Alert) Talk that routed instant messages incorrectly was discovered on Thursday, Sept. 26. This glitch exposed private messages to the wrong recipients. 

It took around three hours from the time that Google publicly acknowledged the issue on its Apps status until it announced the problem had been solved.

During that time frantic messages from users were posted on Google's discussion forums and on other social media outlets, especially Twitter (News - Alert).

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Google's Apps status replied calmly to the frantic messages with a simple reply of "Google Talk is not functioning correctly."

It is still unknown how many IMs were delivered incorrectly. Google is in the middle of moving its variety of IM and audio/video chat services to a new one called Hangouts. Hangouts will replace Google Chat, Google Talk and Google Plus Messenger.

Google also dealt with a Gmail bug on Monday that took nearly 10 hours to fix. They estimate that around 50 percent of Gmail users had e-mail delivery delays and issues downloading attachments.

A Google spokesperson explained, "There was an issue today that affected some people using Google’s instant messaging services. We have since identified the problem, stopped it from recurring, and are currently applying a fix. We're very sorry to anyone affected."

ZDNet reports that, it appears that the error was a glitch in the software and no pattern had developed in terms of whom the problem affected and when it occurred.

It appears that the glitch was present within Google Apps for business accounts, including those who had not yet switched over to Google's new Hangouts. Google recently updated the mobile version of Hangouts, upgrading it to version 1.1.2.

Google replied to concerns with this statement, "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Talk. We're sorry for the inconvenience. For further updates please refer to the Apps Status Dashboard."