We  had a short unplanned outage today.  The issue has been resolved and total downtime was ~15 minutes.

Very few calls were affected, perhaps as few as 2.  We apologize if your’s was one of them.

The good news is that our monitoring, alerting and recovery systems worked as designed.  Yippie!

Thanks for using Brring!

There have been several blog posts in the recent days referring to changes in the Brring service. We’d like to clarify some of the points raised in these posts and in a few rare cases correct factual errors. We promised to show you ‘how we make the sausage’; it isn’t always pretty but it is real.

Brring is indeed discontinuing the ‘free’ numbers supplied by one of our providers. We are taking this action because they have proven to be too expensive to be supported by advertising alone. We are not targeting users with high call volumes, high reward balances or any other metric other than who provides the Brring number they have been assigned. The group does skew towards long-time users of the service simply because we stopped issuing new numbers from this provider several months ago. It does affect a significant percentage of our membership base but is by no means ‘most’ of our members.

All previously redeemed rewards for these accounts will be honored. If a member does not choose to upgrade to a PLUS account any unredeemed rewards will be lost. This is consistent with our policy regarding closed accounts and is not unique to this situation.

We are not discontinuing our free number service. Brring continues to offer a free, advertising supported, service. The only change to this service is that you may no longer indicate a desired area code. We may match Brring numbers to the new user’s area code (and in some cases even the user’s city) if they are available to us but many times they are not. In those cases we randomly assign an available number to the new user. The ability to select a Brring number is one of the value-added features of the new Brring PLUS service.

It has been suggested that Brring offer the PLUS service to those affected members with reward balances. We love this idea and would like to offer this option to anyone who is impacted by this change. If you would like to apply outstanding rewards towards a PLUS account please contact support@brring.com with your account details and we’ll get it set up.  We will extend the conversion deadline (originally today) to allow folks a few days to consider this option. We’ll also send another email to those members affected by the change and inform them of this option.

Brring has paid thousands of dollars in rewards to individual members. Anyone who claims otherwise is simply wrong. It is true that the tap has drawn down to a trickle but for the simple reason that it is more important to keep the service running than to pay individual rewards. If we were to close the service all rewards would be forever lost.

This is not a decision we have made easily or happily, but it was necessary.

We know how frustrating it can be to not get a response to your questions in a timely manner. We are customers too and we do feel your pain.

We’ve all seen movie scenes where someone is trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak their language; they speak LOUDER. We all know how well that works. Sending multiple emails about the same issue works just as well.

Submitting multiple requests/emails for the same issue will not speed up the resolution of your issue. In fact, quite the opposite happens, it slows down the process dramatically as we have to ‘link’ all those requests together into a single issue – a time consuming process. We’d much rather be addressing your issue than linking 12 identical requests together.

We realize that our response time can be longer than we’d like; no one here is happy about it but we are doing all that we can within our current resource constraints.

We appreciate your patience as we build Brring! into the service that you’ll love.

Early this morning we had an issue with one of our telephone providers.  This prevented inbound calls to about 1/3 of our members.

Between approx. 7AM and 1015AM inbound calls to our members who have numbers issued by that telco. were not completed.  The issue has been resolved and calls are going through normally.

If you are experiencing trouble receving calls on your Brring number please send an email to support at brring dot com.

Thanks for using Brring!

We are experiencing an issue with one of our ad providers.  It is causing dropped & silent calls.

We are working to resolve ASAP.

Update – 2:15PM ET: We have implemented a work-around and things are back to ‘normal’.  Thanks for your patience.