All PayPal subscriptions (recurring transactions) have been cancelled and credits have been issued for those folks that were already charged for this month.

Thanks for your support these last 4+ years, it’s been a blast.

Peace,

Brring! Team

Update: 2:21P
We have experienced a catastrophic hardware failure in our data center. As luck would have it, it is the only piece of equipment for which we do not have a redundant backup. We are working with our hardware vendor to get a replacement in place as quickly as possible.

Update: 9:00A
A replacement part is on it’s way to the data center (sending positive waves to UPS…). We are also transferring call traffic to our backup phone server. This process takes some time so it will work for some folks sooner than for others. The elves are on it!

Update: 1030A
Call processing: All members have been migrated to the backup server. We are still recovering the customized ringbacks tones from our backups so some callers may not yet be hearing them.

Web Site: Restoring the website was our second priority. Now that the call processing has been restored we’re off to resurrect the website. More later…

Our provider has not provided an estimated-time-of-repair (ETR) for this outage. We will post updates here as we learn them.

Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: You may follow also us on Twitter, @brring, for updates.

UPDATE 2: Power is on and services have been restored. Thanks for your patience.

• The ability to assign different ringbacks to different callers
• A public ringback exchange, where you can upload and share ringbacks with the community
• An improved web interface for managing your account.

At that time we also announced Brring! Plus, a premium option that eliminates ads for callers and includes additional features such as selective call blocking.

In recent months it has became clear that in the current economy an ad-supported version of the service is not sustainable. Therefore, effective December 10, 2009 we will no longer offer the free, basic ad-supported version of the service (Brring! Free) and will only support Brring! Plus.

Current Brring! members that wish to retain their existing Brring! Free number must upgrade to Brring Plus. In recognition of their loyalty, we are offering existing Brring! Free account holders a 25% discount off the monthly price of $2.99. For only $2.25 a month you keep your existing account, your callers will enjoy an ad-free experience, and you will have call blocking capabilities. You can upgrade now by logging into the Brring! website and following this link (www.brring.com/upgrade).

Current Brring! members please note that if you chose to do nothing, existing Brring! Free numbers will expire on December 10.

This is not a path we wanted to take.  We believed that we could offer a compelling and useful service that was completely supported by ad revenue; we were wrong.  We are by no means the only one who made this mistake; anyone who even casually follows the business of online services is keenly aware of the number of companies that have shutdown due to the failure of a ad-supported business model.

We’re just a small group of folks, with families and mortgages, trying to build something cool and useful, who just can’t continue to fund this thing of ours out of our own pockets. Our new pricing model will allow us to continue running the service while we weather the economic storm.

We hope that you find the new ad-free Brring! useful and choose to support us so that we may continue to offer it to you.

Thanks.

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!