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May 20, 2008

Who’s About To Get Fired From Google?

Jason Kincaid

67 comments »

We’ve been getting a number of tips that say Grandcentral.com has been down for some users, and that their domain name is set to expire today.

We’ve done our best to confirm, and we believe that these rumors have some merit:

a) EasyDNS is the registrar of record for Grandcentral.com
b) EasyDNS’s WHOIS record shows that Grandcentral.com’s domain expires today, May 20th
c) EasyDNS has already taken over the DNS for the domain
d) The DNS server does not have an IP address for Grandcentral.com
e) For many people, Grandcentral.com isn’t working
f) Grandcentral seems to be working for users that access the site through its IP address: http://216.239.37.52

While some users may still be able to access the site, this may be because of a delay in DNS propagation. If Google has let the domain expire, then these users won’t be able to use the site by this time tomorrow.

This isn’t the first time that Grandcentral has run into problems. Last month the service was down for hours - a luxury that a phone company can’t afford.

We should note that even if the domain has expired, Google will still have a grace period to remedy the situation. That said, if the lapse proves to be real, it would be an embarrassing move on Google’s part.

Update: Google has renewed the domain for a year. Nice save!

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

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Comments

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  1. Hendra

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:06 pm

    yupe, not resolvable to me.

  2. manufacturer

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:09 pm

    DNS’s WHOIS Google ? is too many

  3. Loren Feldman

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:12 pm

    Thank G-d I’m Not Alone 

  4. Frank

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:14 pm

    Hey Google, how bout this…

    You hire me and give me a desk and let me mooch around the Googleplex all day and maybe play volleyball in the afternoon. Perhaps followed by some foosball.

    And I’ll look up a list of of all your domains once every morning and make sure that your domains don’t expire. Oh, and pay me $100,000.

    All you domain problems solved. Easy.

  5. AcmePhoto

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:17 pm

    Interesting how 216.239.37.52 sort of looks more like a phone number…

    Maybe it’s just rebranding? ;-)

  6. Patrick Li

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:18 pm

    Oh c’mon. They’d never fire someone for that. But I suppose the it might be the PM’s fault if you really have to point a finger at someone.

  7. Krish

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:20 pm

    This reminds me of the problem hotmail had after Passport.com expired some years back. A Linux enthusiast saved the day for Microsoft then.

    http://www.doublewide.net/passport.htm

  8. Victor

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:21 pm

    I just registered grandcentral.com at GoDaddy. I can’t believe it was available. Sweet! I think it will make a great porn site….

  9. Frank Church

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:23 pm

    Funny that nobody thinks this is because they are moving over to a more “Googly name”, perhaps a a sub-domain of google .com.

  10. xavierv

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:25 pm

    I wouldn’t under-estimate Google that fast…

  11. Patrick Li

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:26 pm

    @9, having worked there before, they rarely expire its old names. Look at writely.com for example, it redirects you to docs.google.com

  12. Rob Mowery

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:27 pm

    It seems the phone numbers still work fine. Perhaps they are finally moving it under the Google domain? Maybe it will be like grandcentral.google.com or phone.google.com or something? Doing a tracert on the 216.239.37.52 shows that it is va-in-f52.google.com. So maybe it is in the process?

    It would make sense if the domain is near expiration to jump on bringing it into the Google brand (hopefully it takes less time then it did with jotspot).

    If the GC numbers stop working then I would be worried.

  13. kshep

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:27 pm

    I’ll bet you there’s some sort of CNET/CBS Halsey Minor SOA conspiracy theory that explains it.

  14. Susan Beebe

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:39 pm

    wow…lameo!

  15. Ashley Smith

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:40 pm

    Seems to work fine for me.

  16. Susan Beebe

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:40 pm

    maybe they can go work with the folks at twitter ;-)

  17. Pat Hawks

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:40 pm

    @9 If Google wanted to rebrand GrandCentral, the day after the domain expires is probably the worst time to do so.
    When Google bought GrandCentral, I was super excited about the promise, now it seems as if GrandCentral will be a footnote in a list of technologies that were rolled into Android in some shape (see also Jaiku and Dodgeball)

  18. Anonymous

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:43 pm

    Ashley, it works just fine for me as well. If it still isn’t working for you folks, then a network issue is likely the answer. Go shout at your ISPs.

  19. JS

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:45 pm

    DNS is a pull technology. Changes do not propagate, and I hate it when people even use the word propagate in association with DNS (unless they’re talking about notify updates, which they never are). DNS data gets cached. If some caching servers are out of sync with the master (or the root) it isn’t because something failed to propagate, it’s because the cache has yet to expire. Big difference.

  20. Igor The Troll

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:48 pm

    Could it be that Google LinkBaitng all of us to get PR for Grandcentral.com

    I personally like The Shel Israel Puppet better than this story!

    But this is IMAO!

  21. Sundar

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:48 pm

    Domain Name: GRANDCENTRAL.COM
    Registrar: EASYDNS TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
    Whois Server: whois.easydns.com
    Referral URL: http://www.easydns.com
    Name Server: NS1.EASYDNS.COM
    Name Server: NS2.EASYDNS.COM
    Name Server: NS6.EASYDNS.NET
    Name Server: REMOTE1.EASYDNS.COM
    Name Server: REMOTE2.EASYDNS.COM
    Status: clientTransferProhibited
    Status: clientUpdateProhibited
    Updated Date: 21-may-2008
    Creation Date: 19-may-1997
    Expiration Date: 20-may-2009

  22. Smart

    May 20th, 2008 at 10:53 pm

    By propagate, they mean DNS server to DNS server pulling the data over time as cache expires on each server across the network.

    Lawyers and tech geeks are so sensitive to how things are worded. ;)

  23. Jakester

    May 20th, 2008 at 11:04 pm

    It works fine for me…what is this, a 5 minute transfer and you all freak out. Get a life.

  24. Homeless Man

    May 20th, 2008 at 11:11 pm

    They’ve done it to me again. I was waiting to hear back about a job interview and I can’t access my free GrandCentral voicemail.

    Looks like I’m destined to stay on Market Street for the rest of my days.

  25. David

    May 20th, 2008 at 11:12 pm

    I’m just glad they renewed it for a whole year. Maybe next year if they make 500 billion dollars they will go out on a limb and renew it for 2 years.

  26. Alex

    May 20th, 2008 at 11:14 pm

    I’ve said it many times before. GC has been a train wreck.

  27. EH

    May 20th, 2008 at 11:19 pm

    JS: Pulling does not obviate pushing. See: capillary action.

  28. Sidharth

    May 20th, 2008 at 11:21 pm

    There seems to be some problems with the Google Reader Mobile interface. The main page for subscribptions shows many undread pages but when you go to the subscribed feed there are either no items or much less items than written. When I visited the google reader on my PC it was showing very few unread items

  29. Sammy

    May 20th, 2008 at 11:39 pm

    Sensationalism - esp in the headline - seems to be Jason Kincaid’s forte. This, and just prior to this was “OMG! I need those shoes”.

    If your news is good enough, it will stand by itself. See MAs typical headlines as examples.

  30. Kevin

    May 20th, 2008 at 11:59 pm

    Thank god for the grace period… you have something like a week to reactive domains you let expire.

  31. www.Stiriaz.com

    May 21st, 2008 at 1:03 am

    Great one but About To Get Fired From Google???
    I doubt about it - lets take an example how google want to became eco friend with : google earth

  32. km

    May 21st, 2008 at 1:42 am

    You missed an outage. In January-ish, GC’s SSL cert expired for about 3 days, notifying all users that they weren’t paying any attention… Since when did TC run a domain expiration notification service?

  33. New York City Wedding Photographer

    May 21st, 2008 at 2:28 am

    I signed up for this thing months ago….where’s my invite :P

    Peace,
    Parris Whittingham - New York City Wedding Photographer

  34. Hal O'Brien

    May 21st, 2008 at 2:41 am

    Everyone who had any idea Grandcentral.com existed before reading this post, raise your hand:

    {cue: crickets}

    Job security through obscurity, that’s what I say,

  35. Live Crunch

    May 21st, 2008 at 5:17 am

    Expires in 2009

    ICANN Registrar: EASYDNS TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
    Created: 1997-05-19
    Expires: 2009-05-20

    So not May of this year but next yet.

    Full report
    http://whois.domaintools.com/grandcentral.com

  36. SKhan

    May 21st, 2008 at 5:40 am

    Good to know that “Google has purchased GrandCentral.com” and it domain is working absolute fine at my end.

  37. Mark J

    May 21st, 2008 at 6:32 am

    Some clarifications to the “rumors”

    c) EasyDNS has already taken over the DNS for the domain

    The domain has been with easyDNS since 2000, not sure what this “already taken over” is supposed to mean. It’s been on these nameservers for 8 years.

    d) The DNS server does not have an IP address for Grandcentral.com

    Don’t use nslookup, which has been deprecated and is widely known to return misleading answers. If you had used dig or host you would have seen that all of the delegated nameservers still carried the DNS for the domain. It was just the .com roots which pulled the nameserver glue after the domain expired (and put them back in when it was renewed)

  38. smash

    May 21st, 2008 at 6:41 am

    you say some pretty dumb things hal

  39. Jason

    May 21st, 2008 at 6:57 am

    I thought Google had been using MarkMonitor for all their domain registration and renewal services. Why not for GrandCentral?

  40. matt

    May 21st, 2008 at 7:29 am

    when I first read this i was a bit concerned. but then I saw that they renewed it. You would think they would just renew it for 10 years and forget about it.

  41. Matt

    May 21st, 2008 at 7:42 am

    Sensationalist headline? Yep. But you know what, that’s actually a good question.

    P.S. LOREN FELDMAN is starting to make me really fall-in-like with video comments. :) Truith be told, I do like video comments a lot. Sometimes I refuse to sit here and read all the drivel that morons like me barf onto Mike’s website… but I sure do scan most story’s comment sections for video comments. hehehe.

  42. Thomas

    May 21st, 2008 at 8:16 am

    Okay, well then, I guess no more Grand Central for me. I was using it for important calls that would ring all my phones at once. No longer. Nice f-up Google.

  43. Thomas

    May 21st, 2008 at 8:19 am

    Acquisition checklist addition:
    - Extend acquired domain names for 10 years
    - Forward domain to Office of Domain Maintenance through Form G8-xx4ti

  44. Faux Gentleman

    May 21st, 2008 at 9:00 am

    Piss-poor management

  45. Erich

    May 21st, 2008 at 9:01 am

    Really though, the problem isn’t the domain (although that is a problem). The problem is the service not working right. For many users the service has been wonderful for a very long time. Lately, there have been problems changing greetings, getting notifications, listening to voice mails (all the things the service is about in the first place).

    I for one am a huge fan, but I find it very difficult to put my faith in a company or service that doesn’t even seem to respond timely enough to say “hey, we’re aware of the problem and we’re doing [X] about it.”

    If things were fine before, then any issues going on now should be issues that can be resolved by reverting to a prior version of whatever component is failing or swapping out some hardware (I know that was oversimplified)

    Google/Grand Central, read your support forums and let us know whether or not we need to look for a new service.

  46. Louis-Eric

    May 21st, 2008 at 9:16 am

    I don’t get it; why is a billion-dollar company risking its service and presence to save 90$ from their cash flow by registering year-by-year, rather than do so for the longest available time period ? What value do they attribute to their branding ?

    Register for 10 years, renew for 5 more after 5 have passed, ad vitam aeternam, never worry again !

  47. CG

    May 21st, 2008 at 10:43 am

    To be perfectly honest I hadn’t heard of grandcentral before this article. If the service is important to google (kind of a good fit), don’t you think it will become voicemail.google.com anyway? What’s so important about the brand (especially a domain name) once you’re in the google amoeba?

  48. David Berkowitz

    May 21st, 2008 at 11:38 am

    Um, why for only one year? Can’t they afford the 10-year plan?

  49. William r

    May 21st, 2008 at 12:18 pm

    people dont get fired from google they retire.

    http://www.shopandsave.com is using google for testing new classifeds website to take over craigslist.com

  50. kaguvkov

    May 21st, 2008 at 12:38 pm

    If I was there maybe I’m the one who will be fired! Honestly, I don’t know..

  51. HealthZone

    May 21st, 2008 at 12:39 pm

    You really want to get fired Kaguvkov? I will fire you..

  52. Paul

    May 21st, 2008 at 3:54 pm

    Hey Google Grandcentral… Citi called and they want their logo back.

    http://www.citi.com/domain/cm/img/top_nav/logo.gif

  53. YouYap.com

    May 21st, 2008 at 6:29 pm

    can anyone invite me.
    my email is johnson360@gmail.com

  54. Kevin

    May 21st, 2008 at 10:59 pm

    Can someone confirm this link?

    http://www.google.com/grandcentral/index.html

  55. Kevin

    May 21st, 2008 at 11:14 pm

    Coincidence? …

    http://mail.google.com/grandcentral/index.html

  56. Russell

    May 22nd, 2008 at 5:17 pm

    Google itself is a registrar, so why are they using EasyDNS’s service?

  57. Mark J

    May 22nd, 2008 at 6:18 pm

    Russel: Grandcentral has been an easyDNS client since 2000, Google bought Grandcentral, that’s how they wound up with a domain name on easyDNS. They’ll probably transfer it out to their own nameservers when they get a round tuit.

    Mystery solved.

  58. Russell

    May 23rd, 2008 at 1:07 am

    Thanks for the info, Mark.

  59. www.referate10.com

    May 23rd, 2008 at 2:46 pm

    Yes, a 3D software tool that combines a tool-set with an intelligent drawing system.

  60. Via

    May 23rd, 2008 at 6:52 pm

    I would love for Grand Central to work, but I’m afraid that it appears it’s not ready for prime time.

    Their almost-hidden blog http://blog.grandcentral.com/ has no mention of the latest outage. They post infrequently and mostly “off-topic”. They have not printed comments in the past. I tried again just now:

    Your comment is awaiting moderation.
    May 23rd, 2008 at 6:24 pm

    Anyone minding the shop there? No blog post on the latest:

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....om-google/

    http://webworkerdaily.com/2008...../#comments

    I stopped using GrandCentral until you people become more transparent.

    I’d like to know if I’ll be able to use GC with Skype in the same way one is able to integrate Gizmo.

    Would love for GrandCentral to work, but clearly you have some management issues, despite the acquisition by Google. You people are really blowing it, in my opinion (and others).

    I won’t hold my breath and expect this comment to show on your blog. What’s the deal with the “Submit a Comment” button if you don’t print the comment?

  61. Man United Credit Card

    June 4th, 2008 at 5:45 pm

    You guys are complaining about google and yet you probably use their search services more than anything else.

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