GrandCentral goes dead
This isn’t good, folks. GrandCentral is one of Google’s most innovative offerings. Their "One Number for Life" service provides you with a single phone number that you can route to any combination of land lines, cell phones, and more. It’s a fantastic way to provide people with a single number to contact you without giving out your personal cell number, and it provides an incredible level of flexibility in regards to voicemail routing, caller ID, and other features. All of this is great…when it works. GrandCentral has been down for several hours now, which is a terrible situation to be in for a company looking serve as the front end for all of your telephony needs. Granted, the service is currently in beta, but there’s still no excuse for a systemic outage when the service you provide is so critical for day to day activities. There’s currently no word on when GrandCentral might go back up, and all calls placed to a GrandCentral number are currently being unconditionally terminated. Nice job, Google. Anyone out there relying on GrandCentral as their primary number? We feel for you.
UPDATE: The service appears to be back online and fully functional. Still no word, however, about the cause of the outage.
Come on people. It’s beta. You can’t expect beta to work perfectly regardless of what you use it for. That’s why it’s beta and not an actual release
I agree with sleepy, when signing up for a beta you are fully aware that problems like this may, and will occur. No biggie
Gmail is also a beta (and has been for years), so if it suddenly went down, after basically letting so many people to switch and use it and basically depend on it, would that be OK? Technically speaking it sounds like it should, since it’s a beta after all, but realistically speaking, there would be a huge outcry about it if it happened, and it certainly would cost Google something in some shape or form, be it in users that leave, or don’t join, or something else. Services like this, beta or not, are a little bit more important than others. The least they could do is provide some sort of a communication about what’s going on, even if it’s simple and to the point. Sorry, the “do no evil” part just doesn’t seem to fly that well when stuff like this happens without even being upfront about it, let alone actually addressing it.
GrandCentral is back up and running for me.
Same Here
vehemently agreed. Beta is beta.
I think for any of us that use the service, the surprise of it going down was more of a shock than anything. I have used the service since before it was bought by Google and it has been nothing but reliable. At least it went down on a Sunday for us people who use it for business.
Something has been happening for the last couple of months. Grandcentral won’t let you play old messages a couple of month ago. Maybe google it get it ready for something.
Not working for me. Oh wait, I don’t have an invite.
Any extras out there?
Can someone send me a request to join grand central? Being that’s its beta I have to have an invite. Thanx in advane. My email is devontejcarr1@gmail.com
Wow — from the RSS headline I thought it was dead for like — as in Google closed it down. Now that would have really sucked.
Ok here’s my fishing for an invite too…
alsamuelson – gmail.com
Thanks
just sign up for it & you will get a invite from them within 2 days and they will also let you invite up to 7 more of your friends. am loving it and its free, i have had no problems with it in the current days so i really don’t know what all this is about
Invites are closed, and have been for some time now. You’ll have to try and reserve a number and wait.
i signed up for it a couple of weeks ago and still no email or invite from GC.
Well let me throw my hat in too. Can somebody send me an invite just in case I don’t get one in 2 days? Thanks. lamichealfu7@gmail.com
Hey that’s a great idea! Let’s all bitch about it when something we did to be lazy makes us have to do some fucking work! That’s a good thing!
Yeah it is a fucking BETA and if gmail stopped working I’d be ok because I have more than one email address.
Let’s see…I want to pretend to be super spy so I take a beta service and do important business operation with it….I guess I should take some beta or pre release versions of software and run them on my servers too and then when a bug comes up I can blame someone besides my idiot self because I’m too god damn stupid to be held accountable for my own actions!
Yeah google sure is causing a lot of evil here let’s attack them a little harder for a bit and then oh I know let’s praise apple because I’m sure if they had a beta out it would be perfect…go ahead BGR you know you wana say something about that!
Next I guess its time to blame microsoft because I’m sure its somehow their fault too.
Face it you stupid fucks BETA = use at your own risk and instead of bitching like little annoying fucks you are send a very kind email to google and tell them what’s happening because that’s what beta is for instead of bashing google holy shit maybe they don’t know what went wrong or maybe its none of your fucking business so stop complaining and shut the fuck up.
i want an invite not having to give my real digits to people sounds like treat!
dominican.king@gmail.com make it happen
@ zac: The intelligence is just spewing out of that comment.
By the way, GrandCentral/Google admitted that the ball was dropped by them to one degree or another: http://blog.grandcentral.com/?p=144.
Hi,
Can someone send me an invite to Grand Central Beta.
my email is tamer8@gmail.com
@zac,
You were kind of sounding like an angry Galvatron for a second. LOL.
Grand Central *Down* would’ve been a more appropriate title. This made it sound like Google had shut it down for good…
Honestly, aside from a much better and more truthful (rather than simply sensationalistic) article title, the update about there not being an explanation from GrandCentral/Google also seems a bit odd since there is a GrandCentral Blog where and update about it all was made at http://blog.grandcentral.com/?p=144.
Maybe they just did it to create a media hype. I just signed up for an account.