GrandCentral, Google’s $50 million phone company, has been down all morning (see overview of service here). And that means every single user who has started using their GrandCentral phone number isn’t able to receive any calls. Users are complaining on Twitter, and I’ve confirmed this as well by simply calling friends who use the service. Calls will not go through.
We’ve noted problems with the service in the past, but never a general outage. The site is down. The service is down. Everything appears to be offline.
If you want to be a phone company, and get your users to rely on you to manage all of your incoming calls, this simply cannot happen. There are undoubtedly going to be a lot of very upset homeless people this morning, as well as GrandCentral’s other users.
GrandCentral’s blog is offline as well. If Google wants users to take the service seriously in the future, they should make some kind of announcement on their main blog letting users know what happened and when they can expect the service to be back.
Update: service is back online sometime before noon PST. Still no word from them on the cause of the outage.
Update 2: Cofounder Craig Walker posts the following on the GrandCentral blog:
I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service.
Thanks for your patience with us and we’ll continue to work to make the service better by the day. – Craig Walker
You figure a company that belongs to google would be better prepared?
http://www.ReturnMoi.com
I am a vagrant in San Francisco and I have been receiving free voicemail from GrandCentral. I cannot overstate how inconvenient this outage has been for me.
Fortunately, the free wifi at the Starbucks on Howard St. means that I can use my MacBook Air to stay in touch with all the people who matter to me.
Can anyone PLEASE send me a invite to grand central thanks
stkviper@gmail.com
I wonder if, like Jaiku, they’re trying to move GrandCentral to the Google App Engine platform.
At least it’s a Sunday.
Neil – true. perhaps this is a way to keep costs down.
It’s been pretty bad ever since they were acquired. Craig and Vincent are great guys, but clearly integration or motivation or something hasn’t been too important to them. Can’t say I blame them.
I would like to reassure San Francisco’s homeless population that Google is working dilligently to restore access to your free voicemail. I understand that you have important communications to attend to on Sunday and that GrandCentral is key to your being able to do so. Please bear with Google while this problem is resolved.
I’m glad I decided not to use my GC number as a primary. I would be extremely upset too.
Killing me with the pissed off homeless people callout…just thrown in there, dry…perfect.
I use GrandCentral, but I’ve had doubts for the past few months. They’ve been eerily quiet recently, nothing happening at all, and invites have been shut off for quite a while.
Something about the service doesn’t sit quite right to me. I can’t put my finger exactly on it, just something. I certainly think it’s a great idea, based mostly on the ability to BLOCK BLOCK BLOCK, social media expert style.
It seems to be a very disruptive idea, potentially rubbing some big industry players the wrong way…that’s just me riffing though.
What the hell is going on? I just woke up and got a tweet about GrandCentral being down. Anybody have additional information?
I just got off Skype with Scoble and he says that it’s being fixed as we speak.
Good. Any ETA?
For a minute there I was thinking that a wrench had been thrown in my plans for Sunday. Would have required me to get drunk and attack women in Golden Gate Park.
Homeless Man #4: log on to Meebo and I’ll fill you in on all the details.
homeless man #2 – first two were funny, last one (homeless #4) not so much.
And already the Homeless Man jokes are old and stale.
Well well well… when phone companies go down, people usually search for another company… Anyone have any companies like grandcentral out there that might give them a run for their money?
I mean, companies all have problems but I tell ya, when something sounds as good as oreo cookies…they need to produce…
-=hehehe=-
Pay peanuts – get monkeys.
I heard Ballmer sent out a broadcast message that took the system down. It was something about Yahoo and AOL.
@ Scott K
Kind of like TechCrunch’s content?
Google really needs a new strategy for dealing with the problems users have — the current “report your problem on the public message board and hope for the best” strategy is a flaw that will hurt Google in the future. In fact, the support issue was the main reason the company I work for decided to ditch Google Apps for Exchange. What do you think? Does Google need to change their support strategy, or should people just accept the saying “you pay for what you get”?
(((Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the cellular and electronics industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.)))
I love it when people say “if Google wants people to take the service seriously”, and then follow that up with their own ideas about what serious means.
It’s a great idea Michael. Post this to the main Google blog and let us GC users know what happened and what is being done to prevent it in the future. When has Google ever done that?
What the heck is going on! I was expecting a call about the an empty shopping cart free for the pickup and I ain’t gettin nuthin. Also my man homie was supposed to call re: the condition of a pickthru bin 12 blocks south but again I got nuthin. These folks at grandcentral better get their act together. They think I got nuthin better to do all day than walk my skinny self 12 blocks south to find out how the pickings are? They don’t straighten up I am gonna drop them, and I will move ALL my searches from the google to yahoo!
@ Scott K
I agree with you…
@ Homeless Man #5
cloning is over rated…
I really hope this doesn’t foreshadow issues with Android. Google is a great company and all, but there’s a difference between wired and wireless consumer expectations.
Telecom is (ironically) all about trust. That’s why the big telcos invest so much money in makreting themselves as “most reliable”.
GrandCentral should learn from this. If they want to keep the trust of their beta clients, then they should certainly fulfill their end of the bargain with reliability. And yes, outages are inevitable and yeah they’re still in “beta”, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t send notification to their customers.
Fake Homeless Man #5: cease and desist. If you continue to infringe upon my intellectual property rights, my attorneys at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati will have no choice but to take you to small claims court.
This is unacceptable.
We, the Homeless People, work hard on providing entertainment by holding up clever-worded solicitation signs.
For instance, mine says, “I’m a former record company exec, kindly deposit in my tin cup the equivalent value of the music you downloaded illegally from p2p.”
@Garett
Yes, you do get what you pay for. The support that I have gotten for my Google Apps account has been great. I pay for Google Apps and it has been rock solid for the time that I have been on it, but Google has been very responsive the few times I have had issues.
sic those tards at Wilson Sonsini on me, I will make them the laughinstock on youtube…. PM me and I will send you my GrandCentral number where they can reach me
Huh. I wondered why the phone had been so quiet…
Oh well… I’ve really enjoyed GC, but I never really trusted it, even since the big G acquired it. What I did when I signed up was I forwarded my main voip line to it, and then had GrandCentral call me on a second voip line. If they don’t get things straightened out soon, I’ll just change the forward and I’m good to go (sans call screening).
I wonder if there are any real GrandCentral alternatives out there…
Hello everyone, here’s my grandcentral number(s). Can someone call me or email me at my grandcentral number(s) and let me know when this issue is fixed?
Thanks a million!
3095394224@grandcentral.com
3095394204@grandcentral.com
Wow, you homeless men #x sure wore out your welcome.
Sure there are Grand Central alternatives out there: PhoneFusion One, for example. Oh, you wanted *free* too? That’s not so easy.
Much worse when an internet system like this goes kaplooey (think Skype). It means everyone’s in the dark. Verizon, AT&T, etc can lose a landline sector … or a cell tower … but not the whole country.
Lesson learned is that as frustrating as the baby bells can be, they have lots of repair trucks ready to fix things (eventually), and only a small number of the customer base is affected at one time. The magic of the internet is also its downfall. Lose one, lose ‘em all. And if Google can’t handle this … who can?
Well their blog appears online for me (in the UK) – and there is no mention of this outage. I don’t use it personally – but has everyone received a blanket message from them yet?
@tim-techfruit
No, I haven’t received a blanket message from them yet. And THAT is exactly the problem. I could really use an extra blanket but I ain’t getting no messages! If someone calls me on my grancentral number sayin there is blankets to be had, you better believe I would be hoofin it right down there!
i need one too, i am homeless.
We can only hope that the reason for this outage is a massive upgrade bringing an awesome new feature set on increased reliability. Sadly, this is almost assuredly not the case.
Grandcentral is being dropped.
and Google is having layoffs.
GrandCentral was actually a very decent service. They had customer support online via chat who would handle your issues instantly. Now the only support you’ll get is a link to a google group. Thanks google.
All attempts at lame humor aside, there’s nothing even remotely funny about the current Grand Central outage. As Michael Arrington stated above, going dark is simply not an option for a phone company.
Websites go down despite the best efforts of very bright people — that’s a given, but failing to communicate with subscribers about the status of repairs is no laughing matter. Come on Google, you’re in the business of communication … how ’bout a word or two on the fate of Grand Central?
This is like that joke of a company Voce that just vanished in the night.
As much as we hate the big telcos, it seems like we need to stick with them if we care about reliability. Thank god Google didn’t win the auction. JK
so all of you are saying none of your traditional phone or mobile phone lines have gone down??? if you say no, then you are not stating the truth.
just two days ago, my company phone, with Sprint, went down from around 4 to 7 pm. no incoming or outgoing calls and no internet.
two weekends ago Tmobile was down as well for a few hours. Only text was working.
I am pretty sure there are more Sprint and Tmobile users out there then GC.
And i dont recall ever getting an email or statement, or read a blog from any of those service providers explaining what happened to the system but I am more then sure that guys over at GC and Google will come out with some sort of explanation.
You guys are to quick to jump the gun and pull the trigger.
so no one has ever had their mobile company drop calls, or ever had voicemails that never made it into your box?
Never had your ISP go black for half a day with no notice at all, or your satellite TV flicker during a rainstorm?
Cmon, let’s add some perspective to this conversation. No service is 100% reliable.
it does say BETA..
Looks like it is back up and running!
I opted for GotVoice because it does most of the same stuff GrandCentral does but I didn’t have to adapt a new number to use their service…and no I don’t work for them.
hot dog, gettin calls left and right again! For anyone else interested there is a trove of slightly used cardboard boxes available on the southside… call me on my grandcentral and i will fill in the details!
GrandCentral seems to be back up. I just ran some tests and all worked as normal.
ps…. my man homie says sergey has some sockpuppets on the forum