The tech press and blogosphere certainly love to rail over perceived shortcomings and failings of the telco industry, but turn the tables a bit — such as when Google’s Grand Central telephony/messaging service went dead for SEVERAL HOURS this weekend — and….nothing (ie, check out Google News search on Grand Central outage).
Tech blog TechCrunch reported the outage Sunday (with the headline: If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead), apparently when TechCrunch honcho Michael Arrington noticed his own GrandCentral number was eerily quiet.
Like many Google services, “customer service” for Grand Central consists of an email address. Eventually, Grand Central co-founder Craig Walker posted a note on the GrandCentral blog, noting that he couldn’t respond sooner because he’d “been up in the mountains with the family this weekend.”
All across the telecom world, tech-admins with cell phones and pagers attached to their belts felt a collective shiver across the backs of their necks.
More from Walker:
We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours….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.
It’s important to note that for many Grand Central users, their Grand Central number is now their main telephone number. The core of the service is that users redirect ALL their telephone numbers to the Grand Central number, which of course also means that ALL of a user’s affected phone numbers would have effectively died — not just the Grand Central one. Ouch.
We’ll just say: it’s tough being a telco…and leave it at that.
But I couldn’t be happier that the outage comes on the day this column went live: “The Web is the Web and Telecom is Telecom,” which addresses just these issues.
Let us know what you think in the comments below.
I assume that GC’s Data Center had generator power, so I am curious as to why that failed as well.
I really wonder why they couldn’t get word out somehow (Twitter?, Email?, something) until the co-founder was available. Was no one else able to get any message out at all?
(full disclosure) I work for IfByPhone, which has some overlap in services to GC.
I couldn’t disagree more. I spent a good ten years in telco before going over to the dark side, and taking telco services with me. I think the comment is terribly provincial and short sighted. I don’t know why GC doesn’t have it’s systems set up with alarms or why the CEO would not have someone in charge of getting the word out, but services like GC are the future of voice communications, no matter whose network they ride.
Why my colleagues insist on this type of smug rhetoric is beyond me. Fiddling while Rome burns? Now, what is the land line erosion rate? The public wants these services, and without the usual non-cost based pricing of incumbants. We should all take note at the adoption rates of these ’second class’ offerings and offer them ourselves.
I totally disagree with GC’s business model and believe their existance is completely reliant on the Google treasury, however ‘big telco’ models are equally as onerous and account in no small part for the astounding number of people who are willing to accept Skype quality. Somebody has to pay for the network. So Skype doesn’t work. But how does Quest justify charging $4.95 a month for caller id or $.22 a minute intra lata? No mas!
The truth of course lies somewhere in the middle. But so long as millions are willing to try these services, the VCs are going to be willing to fund them in hopes that one will find the right model. The point is smug columns about how superior OUR network is don’t solve the problem. WE’RE better because we were protected by monopoly status for a hundred years and inherited a huge customer base and its cash flow.
Rich, there’s nothing you or I did to deserve that advantage. The cash flow from that base is declining so at some point the incumbants get to compete with these little start-ups based on equal access. Then I’d like to see if Ivan Siedenberg over at Verizon will have his ‘pager’ on for outages on the weekends like I and so many of my colleagues do.
It is kind of odd that only the Co-Founder responded. I think the response time and the lack of activity on the GC site perhaps has something to do with the Google buyout.
Before they were always blogging about something and talking about new features. He did however say they would be keeping more up to date soon.
Who knows that’s just my .02