It seems like something related to Google+ integration.
Today, my real name and the location that I had had in Google+ is appearing as my Google Talk name and status rather than the old nick/status that I had set.
I mean that in the "genuine curiosity" sense, not the usual snarky xkcd sense. What do you know? Who do you know? Please elaborate.
Have they angered Midas and his mighty golden touch? Did they finally get enough of them down at the same time to where they couldn't bring any of them back up? Circular dependencies are fun that way.
I was on call the day of a cascading failure event some years ago for something not too different than this. They kept trying to blame my service, but it wasn't us. We were actually staying up despite the extra load being created by all of the thrashing. It turned out to be something else entirely.
Citation - I work at Google (in a much different area). It was actually a change rolled out to talk systems. I don't know what the change was yet but will get details and the system is recovering.
They used to have something similar back in the days of Orkut. The Orkut name would get set as the Google Talk name. People used to change their Orkut names a lot to say something "cool". Then suddenly they stopped syncing the accounts with Orkut and the name that you had on Orkut stuck.
edit: It was a change to talk, not sure what it was that failed yet.
edit 2: Google Talk has been restored for some users and should be resolved for all in near future.