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.

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

You can buy or rent switches and ILEC cage space to run your little virtual phone forwarding business. You can contract with any number of telco POP services to whore out 5ESS channel banks. You can use services like Intelepeer to get redundant end to end voice for circuit switched and VOIP carrier services.

But if you dont have a top engineer at the helm, there are too many subtle issues to count. Buying a service is not the same as running a service.

I’ve used a service called B-Phone for years. Although I’m sure it’s features are limited compared to GC, it has worked great for me and I can’t recall ever having an outage. It’s not free, but it’s pretty cheap (www.bphone.com)

GrandCentral seems to be up and running again with no explanation on there blog or anything like that. But it is working I tested my number and everything looks OK now…

Gee, it says “Beta” right on the front page. Why would you NOT also give your real phone number out during this TRIAL period?

I understand the inconvenience, but if they had a failed major software update, for example, that’s part of life as a tester.

@sal

tell me when US Cellular went down in the last 12 (calendar) months please.

@Hashim Warren

Dropped calls are one thing, “black out” is another.. satellite TV? Well that goes out all the time (used to it)
Emails sure they go down.

I think the point here is that unless we find out from a forum or a blog that GC is down, we wouldn’t have known from google or grand central themselves and they are “supposed” to be on the frontline of communication.

-=hijklmnop=-

seems to be working nicely, when a company goes down don’t they make their users aware of it though through some kind of message.
maybe they could have posted it on their home page or something unless their entire network was down and they couldn’t communicate. I mean google has been up this entire time did they have a message about this on their home page? if they own them that would have been wise.

Michael,

The service has now been restored after this morning’s outage (which did not affect Project CARE). Sorry for the lack of communications as we have been busy restoring service. We are working on making sure this does not happen again.

Vincent Paquet
GrandCentral

The Homeless Men - the best thing all week (apart from #5)

At first we absolutely loved Grand Central, then suddenly it began announcing every incoming call as being “Anonymous” - even the local test calls I made from landlines with perfectly good CallerID assigned.

Our callers also began telling us they were now hearing a 9-to-13 second delay before they heard a ring-confirm tone, which prompted many callers to hang up, thinking the call had failed…

My calls and my emails to Grand Central went without even an auto-response. (Sigh). Oh well, maybe they’ll fix the interLATA network-to-network bugs, maybe not..

The Team
http://wirelessspeech.blogspot.com

Site, blog and service is back up now.

Google is the New Microsoft, just this time it is ALOT worse, because GOOGLE has all your information on thier servers too.

Grand Central has been down since at least very early this morning - felt more like ‘last night’ for me, so I’d be curious to get the actual outage time. I don’t even have a GC number, but the entire website was down.

That said, my cell phone is often broken/useless/down - especially during any kind of weather event, or even just a big night out on the town - some holiday - I now almost expect to get an ‘All circuits busy’ during any local event. So, GC goes down unexpectedly during random Saturday nights/Sunday mornings, and traditional cell phones/carriers go down expectedly during very important events, exactly when you need them most.

I’m not crazy about the options.

For the racists in the crowd - I’m all up for having some fun - but the ebonics talk is starting to show your true colors. HUD says that less than half of homeless people are black, about 60% are minorities, and 65% male. That leaves a lot of white folks and women on the streets. Let’s get them all a copy of Atlas Shrugged.

http://www.hud.gov/news/releas.....07-020.cfm

Down here in Austin, there are one to three white people looking for handouts at just about every suburban off-ramp in and around the city - I’ve never seen anything like it. And Austin is ‘prosperous’, apparently.

Now, if we could convince the federales to take those welfare payments to the oil and gas corporations ($5+ Billion a year) and ethanol corporations ($7+ Billion a year), we could probably end homelessness outright - and then TC readers wouldn’t have to read subtle and not-so-subtle racism-tinged humor.

IT people playing in a telephony world. It’s all fun and game until you vest!

Sorry, but to anyone who is relying on a *BETA* service to “serve as the front end for all of your telephony needs.” needs their head read. Honestly people, you do remember what Beta means, right?

Grand Central = One Phone # and Company to Rule Them All

Thought Frodo made it to Mt. Doom earlier today. Perhaps not.

@Homeless Man

Good one.

The whole “homeless” thing was rather ridiculous.

Yes, GC is beta. Has been beta for more than a year now. Still, they clearly want us to use their service, which is fairly pointless if it’s not your primary phone number. So basic uptime is something that, even in beta, GC cannot afford to get wrong.

Beta for years, and now silent for nearly a year after the Google acquisition. Vincent Paquet & Craig Walker, I guess you are reading this, and I hope you will find a way to let your customers know *something* in the near future - even if it is nothing more than a date when we can expect to hear more news. It’s important, because you are losing us with this silence. Vincent & Craig, we want you to succeed at this, and we wish you luck, but c’mon guys. It’s time to walk the walk. If there’s someone or something at Google that’s holding you back, it’s time to go over their heads and get your mojo back on.

Another note - Garett Rogers hit the nail on the head about support issues. This isn’t just a GC issue, it is true of other Google services as well. Users holler down the forum hole and hope that something vaguely resembling an authoritative and/or useful reply will come back out.

Finally, hey Mike (Arrington): it’s probably past time to do an article on alternatives to GC. I have searched, but my google-fu is strangely deficient in this area. Already in comments I have learned of two (for-pay) alternatives I didn’t previously know about (Bphone.com, phonefusionone.com) and I’ll be looking more closely at them as soon as I finish this post. If you (or other readers here) know of others and can report on the level of service, that would be helpful. I don’t mind paying for the right feature mix!

Any assumption that local phone companies don’t mess up is outrageous. I know of at least one recent incident where my neighbor’s land line was crossed and therefore useless for incoming calls. At least in this case you don’t get any calls so you don’t have to be an answering machine for another person.

Really Michael, no phone company you’ve ever used has had a service outage?

Newbie, you were asking for alternatives to GrandCentral…check out Ifbyphone.com…much more powerful with what you can do there.

–> freddie

Xero:

Telco outages usually don’t leave you with dead air - you get some sort of busy tone or recorded message which at least lets you know the company still exists and is working on the problem. If you can get to a working phone you can call in to their customer service. If you have internet you can still get to their website. You may see their trucks down the street working on the problem, or know you’ve been in a serious storm which gives you a clue to what caused the problem. You can usually turn on the news (television) and get updates on the issue.

But when a web company *has* no customer service number, and their website is off the air, and people calling you are just getting RNA (Ring No Answer), and you get the same RNA when trying to check your messages … you’re in a vacuum. You may be lucky enough to stumble on this report from TC, but more likely you are stuck in that vacuum, wondering what has happened, and having no clue whether GC even still exists.

It is a different thing. And shouldn’t be made light of. It’s serious.

yeah, telecom services CANNOT GO DOWN if they want to stay in business.

which is of course why the blackberry service is no longer viable after their two outages last year.

enough with the hyperbole; all services go down from time to time - even telecom.

Bryan (and everybody else on this thread)…the lack of visibility and response was totally my fault on this one. I was out of range, literally, in the mountains with the family and just got back this afternoon. Although the team was on the issue and got it resolved this morning, had I been available I would have posted something much sooner. My bad, and I’ll do much better in the future - Craig

Craig, while the lack of visibility during an outage is bad, what many of us GC users *really* want is more visibility and accountability and feedback during uptime. IE: we want to know when GC will start visible forward motion again.

You had it prior to the Google acquisition.

Since then, it feels like GC is a black hole.

Mr. Walker:

that’s not going to cut it. Fronting virtual forwarding numbers is a serious business, as many small and medium businesses rely on these types of services.

All of the criticisms here are right-on-point - you wanna play telco? Run it like a telco service. “I was in da mountains” would not cut it in any local central office, tandem center, toll center, long lines, digital trunk office, strowgar clack-shack, what have you.

telco network engineers are trained and live for reliability. get some.

@Bryan, I’m a long time GC users and I love it. GC is for a) business and /or b)social . It is unclear what you use it for but business is not usually done on Sunday, and personal contacts usually have multiple ways to contact me. YMMV, but not paying or getting an SLA (or even close) might tell you how to utilize this service.

As for references to big Telcos and being updated via network television: If anyone (significant #s) in the US population relied on GC I bet it too would make “the news”.

Please try to use services you are comfortable with using. It’s not like google hides their practices or forces you to use their services. you are the type of whiner that makes it necessary for me to spend extra for things b/c the average cost to support people like you drives the cost for a low-maintenance customer like me higher.

FYI, ringcentral dot com also has great service if you need some sort of SLAs.

Thanks for the update Craig, I hope you had fun. Don’t you think it may be time for some redundancy in that position? Please do not mistake the cry-babies for normal, and end- support for personal accounts.

If I laugh at the homeless man jokes (well, the first one or two, then it got tiresome), but I don’t get the implicit racism and ebonics, do I get a pass from your moral outrage, or do I get lumped in with it because I don’t have your finely tuned sense of righteousness?

Just asking. I do so want you to like me and approve of my laughter. Perhaps you could make a list of things it is still safe for me to laugh at. Providing that would be a real service to the reality based community. Plus, it would give you something useful to do.

Everytime these COLO outages pop up and affect real time services, I know who hasn’t heard of hot backups.

He was up in the mountains with the family? Give me a break. I don’t run a Google Application, and I am more connected than he is.

“Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier.”

Unfortunately, this makes GrandCentral sound like a one-man “dude with a colo box” outfit.

Don’t they have tech support? Marketing? PR? Anybody besides a cofounder who can respond to clients during a service outage?

@75 Alan

BINGO!

@ Frank Church:

“you are the type of whiner that makes it necessary for me to spend extra for things b/c the average cost to support people like you drives the cost for a low-maintenance customer like me higher.”

Frank, I think you may have mistaken my tone, which wasn’t about whining, but was about candid feedback on the service, without taking any snarky or belittling tone of voice.

Come on guys, let’s get some perspective. It’s a free service that was down for a few hours. Life still goes on.

Definitely inconvenient…but…it does still say “beta!”, right?

Yes, GrandCentral still says “beta” — but so does Gmail, and I’m certain Google is happy to have so many rely on its services despite those labels. Plus, GrandCentral’s promise from more than a year ago (prior to its acquisition by Google) was that it would soon be out of beta, with a paid version for those who wanted all of its features.

This weekend’s outage is certainly not the first problem GrandCentral has had in the past year. In recent months, outgoing greetings were deleted and voice mails were inaccessible. At least once, GrandCentral actually lost (and was unable to recover) voice mails.

While no system is perfect, I agree communications have been awful. Features promised long ago are still not available, Google’s acquisition seems to have added nothing to the service, and a GrandCentral blog entry from two months ago (Feb. 10, 2008) promising “a lot of new features in the works” that they would be “rolling… out quickly” apparently has not materialized.

With such poor communication, lack of visible progress and too many problems, one has to wonder about the future of GrandCentral — though I’d like to be hopeful.

It would be an opportunity for Digitrad to launch its service in the US. The offer is close to Grandcentral solution, Digitrad started in France to market free multimedia phone numbers with a call forwarding to your mobile and more than 130 other destinations. The great point is that you can use your phone number to call these 130 destinations for free.
http://yes.digitrad.com
It will soon be in english and provide other EU numbers, why not US ?

Me and a friend in Boston both have GC. In fact we’ve had it for at least a year. How the hell does service get worse AFTER Google buys it??? GC is supposed to be up and running, but he and I are both still down. I call him (or the other way around) and it rings - then VM. But it never rings on our actual phones.
I know its free. But this is ridiculous. I have watched things get worse and worse since GC was bought by Google. It doesnt seem they take this beta very seriously.