It was only three days ago that Google Voice had some serious issues making outbound calls for some users — you’d place a call, and it would ring endlessly without ever actually reaching your contact.
And now, it looks like the service is having more problems. For at least 20 minutes, some users (including me) have been unable to reach voice.google.com — the service’s main hub, where you can send text messages and keep track of your conversations. I’ve also been unable to make outbound calls and some inbound calls from my phone, though the GMail/Google Voice integration still works fine (as it did during the problems earlier this week). A test text message a friend sent hasn’t reached my phone, either.
Update: Voice.google.com and my calls are all working as of 2:25 —we’ll update once we confirm that the issues have been resolved for everyone.
Update 2: Google confirms that all issues have been resolved as of 2:35PM PST. Looks like there were around 45-50 minutes of downtime.
I’m really hoping this isn’t the start of a trend. No, Google Voice is not a carrier, but it stands as a middleman between your carrier and your phones, and people aren’t going to put up with the service for long if reliability becomes an issue. As Michael wrote back when the service was still GrandCentral, if you want to be a phone company, you can’t go dead.
We’re hearing that this not affecting everyone, but it’s unclear how many people are affected — judging by how many are tweeting about this, it isn’t just a minor blip.
Google has given us this statement;
“We’re aware of an issue that’s affecting some percentage of Google Voice users and we’re working hard to resolve it.”
