But GrandCentral is still in beta. And while we've grown used to Google's beta products being more stable than many companies' final release products, we probably shouldn't be surprised when a beta product goes down. And this morning, a lot of people were probably worried about missing phone calls because of the outage.
The service was restored by noon, Pacific time. But the fact that a "power issue" at a single facility could knock out GrandCentral phone service across the country is going to make us think twice before giving out our GrandCentral phone number from now on. Hopefully one of the things Google will do before taking the beta label off of GrandCentral is build some redundancy into the system to avoid this sort of problem in the future.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-14-2008 @ 8:19AM
Jeremy Dixon said...
Maybe the problem isn't so much building in redundancy, but Google itself building the kind of expertise necessary to run a zero-downtime type of service.
Reply
4-28-2008 @ 9:03AM
Rich said...
There is an easy work-around; simply keep a vonage line or cellular # that you use as your public number, and permanently forward all calls to the grand central number; that way you get all the functionality, but if there is an outage, just unforward and either use the vonage system or drop the sim into a cell if you are using cellular. Since Grand Central has charged $0.00 to everyone so far, I really don't think anybody is in the situation to say anything except thank you for the phenomenal service that has been provided so far.
4-14-2008 @ 10:11AM
tamer8 said...
Does anyone have an invite to grand central beta? If so please email me at tamer8@gmail.com
Reply
4-24-2008 @ 7:36AM
tj said...
I am also looking for a grand central invite. can anyone help me tjwj912@gmail.com.
4-14-2008 @ 12:37PM
mtnplay said...
Sorry, I don't buy it. Not even Grandcentral or Google is stupid enough to have this hosted at a data center without redundant bandwidth or redundant power through a back-up generator with a temporary UPS. They are lying. It was something more substantial. Power outage....whatever
Reply
4-14-2008 @ 9:42PM
Victor Agreda, Jr. said...
Well, you can spend a lot of money getting to the five 9's of uptime, but anything more than that... Akamai does it, in a way, because of all the caches they've got. And of course, Google has put datacenters all over, which helps, but this sounds more like something else (as mtnplay points out).
Still, I hate that I put my GC phone # on my biz cards. Not only does it require extra steps for me to *answer* a call, but it puts callers through some hoops, AND when my 2nd cell is off, I wind up having to go through a bunch of voicemails that include the GC service chatting away... nothing is perfect.
Reply
4-14-2008 @ 9:43PM
Brad Linder said...
Yeah, I really wish there was a way to turn off the "press 1 to accept this call" 'feature.'
4-14-2008 @ 11:19PM
Victor Agreda, Jr. said...
Well, I see *why* it is there-- so you can pick up from one phone before/after another can pick up in voicemail or something. But yeah...
What's funny is that I tested GC using my wife's phone. Instead of saying her name, I said "duuuude" when prompted to give a name. Now when she calls, I get a call from "duuuuude." I could maybe change it, but why?
4-17-2008 @ 7:49AM
John F. said...
tamer8,
GC suspended referrals a couple of months ago. They say that's temporary.
Reply
4-23-2008 @ 5:46PM
Joe said...
could i get an invite? satec@live.ca
Reply
5-08-2008 @ 10:44PM
John G Brenner said...
When it works, it is second to none. I do use 2 numbers though, one of which is GC, to make sure my clients can contact me.
Reply
5-13-2008 @ 4:39PM
Larry said...
You can sign up for an invitation to GrandCentral here:
http://www.grandcentral.com/home/reserve
Reply