Google's GrandCentral Suffers Outage

GrandCentral, as you may know, is a service that gives you "One Number ... for Life." It centralizes all your different phone numbers into one, and will ring one or more phones ... or go directly to voicemail ... based on rules you set up. You can even set up specific voicemail messages for selected callers.

If GrandCentral wants to replace your current phone service, it needs to be just as bulletproof. And Sunday morning, GrandCentral was down for a number of hours. Of course, as with most Google services, it's still in beta, and hey, it's free. Some might say, "it's free, don't complain about it."

Actually, normally I might be one of those. There is of course the However, besides offering its service to the geeky and supremely organized among us, Google wants to extend its service to the homeless, as I previously wrote. They are already providing such service to the homeless in San Francisco via Mayor Gavin Newsom's Project Homeless Connect, but they do want to expand the program to other locales.

Before you ask why a homeless person would need a phone number, without a phone number it's difficult to get a job - and it's also hard to get one low-income housing waiting list. And those are just the "practical" reasons.

Anyway, the service is up again. According to Google, the problem was caused by a power outage in their Colorado facility. However, what gets me is the statement from founder / CEO Craig Newmark regarding the lack of communication by GrandCentral to users:

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

Whoops! He's the only person authorized / capable of an informative post? On the positive side, they also said:

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.