Google appears to be experiencing a major outage of its Talk and Hangouts online chatting service.
Hundreds of users reported on social networks that their messages were not reaching the intended recipients, and may have in fact been re-routed to random users.
Users took to Twitter and Google's own product forums to report the fault, which HuffPost has also experienced:
One said:
"I was chatting with contact A when suddenly contact B pops up with a message asking me about things I was saying to A. Upon searching my chat history with B, I see my messages to A there, one-sided so it was out of context for B. This was obviously quite shocking, so I told contact C about the issue. I suspected an issue with Hangouts in Google+, which I don't use often but have an account for, and upon opening Hangouts history with A, I see my messages to C there."
It's not clear what is causing the problem, but until it's fixed we recommend you avoid trying to use the tool.
Techcrunch said that it appears the issue is mainly experienced by Google Hangout users chatting with people using the older Google Talk service.
Google said on its apps website that it was "investigating" the issue.
"We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Talk. We will provide more information shortly."