Grasshopper Down for over 30 Hours, Customers Furious

Virtual phone system company Grasshopper has been down since early Tuesday afternoon and remains down as of 7:10 p.m Eastern time due to a hardware failure, according to the company blog.

Grasshopper has no estimate of when its system will be up and running. The outage has affected all of Grasshopper’s 100K-plus customers -- which are mostly startups since Grasshopper targets its phone solutions to entrepreneurs.

Calls to the Massachusetts-based company’s customer service number and office result in the same automated message: “Our phone system is currently experiencing difficulties. Please try your call again in an hour. Good-bye.”

Grasshopper is updating customers here and responding to a stream of furious tweets with messages like, “We know your frustrated with us and we're very sorry about this! We are working hard to get things back up for you.”

CEO Siamak Taghaddos has responded on his account as well. "Yesterday's @grasshopper outage was unacceptable," he wrote early this morning and to customer @crystalrose this evening, "We'll make it right as soon as we've dealt with getting back up. Stay tuned."

The company’s “pricing and sign-up” web page is also down.

Greg Berry, founder and CEO at municibid.com and a Grasshopper client, says he’s not sure Grasshopper had a disaster recovery plan for this kind of situation. “Not a fun couple days for these guys, or for us with respect to our phone system,” Berry told LAUNCH. “We're making due with our own backup plan.”

Berry’s company first noticed problems around noon Eastern time on Tuesday, when calls to its 800 number were “choppy,” and by 2 p.m. calls were no longer going through.

Grasshopper was founded in 2003 by Taghaddos and David Hauser.

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 **UPDATE**
 
Grasshopper's support center reports that, as of 9am EST on Thursday, June 9, all services are back online and stable. 

Read the co-founders' response to the outage here.