Case Study on the Cost of Downtime: GrandCentral

What Happened

On the morning of Sunday, April 13th, internet telephone consolidator GrandCentral (owned by Google) had a several hour long outage. All GrandCentral customers were unable to receive phone calls through their “number for life” and the GrandCentral website was also offline.

During the outage, there was no communication to customers or the community at large The service resumed operating around noon PST. Later that day, Craig Walker published a note of apology on the GrandCentral blog, explaining that the outage was caused by data center power problems, that communication was limited as Craig was unavailable during the outage and committing to improve future communications.

Reactions

In general, most response to the outages was strong and resoundingly negative, but break out into a number of different themes.

Theme 1: Phone Service is Mission Critical

After a number of Twitter users began commenting that the service was unavailable, TechCrunch broke the story with a title that sums up the general response: GrandCentral Offline: If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead. The Consumerist added a similar perspective that GrandCentral’s communication on the outage was worse than what they would expect from a Telco. Garrett Rogers from Googling Google specifically takes Google to task on communicating with customers about the nature of the outage.

Theme 2: Even though the service is in Beta doesn’t make it okay

Both Tech-Ex and Mashable mention the beta state as a possible excuse for both GrandCentral, but don’t find that satisfying or reasonable considering the mission of the service. Download Squad specifically mentions concerns as a customer using the GrandCentral service as a primary phone number going forward, until there are better assurances that downtime will not occur.

Theme 3: Downtime is bad, don’t forget that GrandCentral has a great service idea

To support the adage that sometime there is no such thing as bad press, much coverage on the outage did include highly positive reviews of the service offering. A good example can be found in this article in Information Week.

Our Perspective

Communication after a downtime incident occurs:

In this case, GrandCentral simply failed completely to effectively communicate with its customers during the outage period. No communication from the organization was forthcoming until after Craig Walker returned from being out of pocket. Either there was a total failure in executing a outage communication plan, or one simply did not exist to be followed prior to the outages occurance.

Cost of downtime:

While in this case impossible to ascertain outside of the organization, there was clearly tangible losses in productivity to GrandCentral’s users, real cost to GrandCentral IT operations and management team in having to deal with the outage and reputational damage caused to GrandCentral

Lessons learned:

There are two primary lessons to take away from the GrandCentral outage. The first, as we have discussed earlier in a previous blog post, Seven Key Lessons to Keep in Mind When Communicating an IT Failure, is that effective communication is critical to minimizing the impact that downtime can have on the organization. The second is that we see once again that customers expect 100% uptime, even if you are a Web 2.0 firm, the service is free, and the service is currently in a beta release status.

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