Google Voice Is A Hot Mess Right Now

Oh dear. Google Voice has gone all kinds of wonky after it was opened up to the general public this past June.

Check it:

(via TechCrunch)

What happened? In June Google Voice opened up for anyone to use, and there was clearly a surge of new people trying out the service. For the most part it weathered that storm. But last week Google launched Google Voice for Gmail, allowing users to make and receive calls right from the browser. It’s awesome. Truly useful. 1 million calls were made from Gmail in 24 hours.

Uh oh. That’s when the trouble started. About 30% of my inbound calls have the caller muted – they can hear me but I can’t hear them. And outbound calls are worse. In the last 24 hours at least 75% of them failed completely. Either it never starts ringing, or it rings a couple of times and then dies. In fact, I called Google PR to give them a heads up on this story and that call failed too. As did a second attempt.

It is important to note that, right now, there are no known widespread issues or outages with Google Voice. TechCrunch is looking into reports of people experiencing some trouble with the service, but these are isolated problems and not necessarily related to the increase in usage.

Truth be told, I've been experiencing similar problems myself. I've decided to part ways with Google Voice for the time being, at least until they get their act together.