mcheema, I would agree with you if were were talking about waiting across a weekend, or a couple of days.  But the problem is that when you offer a service, a certain percentage of users are going to come to rely on it, and right now all those affected are in a kind of state of limbo.  If Google Voice would come out and say, "sorry, we can't fix this", then we would all know where we stand and could move on with life.

My guess is that what happened here is what typically happens in large corporations - the people who really know how a system works (the original designers and maintainers, who in this case probably originally worked for Grand Central, the company Google purchased and renamed Google Voice) either leave the company or get transferred to another department.  The people now running this thing probably don't really have a clue how it works, and are left to babysit a system they don't understand.  They may be experts in search, or security, or something else, but they apparently don't understand IP telephony.

Over time, maybe Google will decide they really need to hire some experts in IP telephony and run this thing as if it weren't some kind of backyard weekend project.  On the other hand, they may decide to kill it altogether.  There's an interesting sentence in yesterday's article by technology columnist Tom Keating (http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/asterisk/asterisk-18---major-release-sports-200-new-features.asp), writing about new features in Asterisk 1.8, which was just released:

"Google Talk and Google Voice support—Inbound and outbound support for Google Talk and Google Voice calling. Google is serious about voice. Google is offering a free DID and free calling until the end of 2010 via Google Talk. So with the Google Talk integration, you essentially have a FREE trunk to make free calling on your Asterisk PBX."

This has several implications, but the one that concerns me is the "free calling until the end of 2010." Assuming that Mr. Keating didn't just pull that date out of some part of his anatomy, that means one of two things - either Google is going to discontinue the service as we know it at the end of 2010 (which would not jibe with his statement that "Google is serious about voice"), OR they are going to try to turn it into some kind of pay service.  If they plan on discontinuing it (or at least the Gizmo5 functionality) why don't they just say that and not leave us hanging on like this?  But if their plan is to start charging for the service, then they need to understand that when people are relying on them for their communications, an attitude of "we'll fix it when we get around to it" is NOT going to fly.  They either need to get competent people working on this project, or let it go.

I don't really care if Google provides phone support, but I would expect them to at least have someone capable of taking a phone message and passing it along to the proper department, and I would expect them to have some avenue where bugs can be reported and users can receive some kind of status update (something perhaps a bit more substantial than, "we're working on it" - maybe something that at least indicates they have some clue as to what caused the problem in the first place).  Posting a message in a help forum is not really an acceptable avenue for reporting issues, unless they plan to have someone follow the forum religiously and issue timely updates. It would be far better if they had an "issue tracker" where you could make a report and receive some kind of confirmation number or link, that you could then use to check the status of your issue, similar to the system that several commercial VoIP providers use.

Mark my words, if Google Voice continues to behave as though they don't need to receive and act on reports of problems in a timely manner, it's going to wind up costing them big money.  Either somebody's going to sue them, or some hotshot state regulator or attorney general is going to step in and give them a whole lot of grief (and that will be particularly true if they ever start charging real money for this service - that, at least in the eyes of some regulators, will mean that they have crossed the line into being a "telephone company", with all that implies).  I'm not wishing that on them, but I'm just saying that when a company gets as big as Google tries to get into a field as important as telecommunications, they had better be sure they do it right, or don't do it at all (obviously, I'd prefer that they do it right).