I think the service is being hit pretty hard. I'm getting the same.

I don't think that Google can be slashdotted ;)

It's not google.com. Chrome has speech recognition service that goes to google's servers. And that service is being hit hard, not google.com.

You're probably right. It's Chrome's speech recognition service that is having this issue. It's also affecting other sites.

From the reports that might be geographical.

I'm in India now and keep getting "No Internet connection" as well.