The tech press and blogosphere certainly love to rail over perceived shortcomings and failings of the telco industry, but turn the tables a bit — such as when Google’s Grand Central telephony/messaging service went dead for SEVERAL HOURS this weekend — and….nothing (ie, check out Google News search on Grand Central outage).

Tech blog TechCrunch reported the outage Sunday (with the headline: If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead), apparently when TechCrunch honcho Michael Arrington noticed his own GrandCentral number was eerily quiet.

Like many Google services, “customer service” for Grand Central consists of an email address. Eventually, Grand Central co-founder Craig Walker posted a note on the GrandCentral blog, noting that he couldn’t respond sooner because he’d “been up in the mountains with the family this weekend.”

All across the telecom world, tech-admins with cell phones and pagers attached to their belts felt a collective shiver across the backs of their necks.

More from Walker:

We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours….I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service.

It’s important to note that for many Grand Central users, their Grand Central number is now their main telephone number. The core of the service is that users redirect ALL their telephone numbers to the Grand Central number, which of course also means that ALL of a user’s affected phone numbers would have effectively died — not just the Grand Central one. Ouch.

We’ll just say: it’s tough being a telco…and leave it at that.

But I couldn’t be happier that the outage comes on the day this column went live: “The Web is the Web and Telecom is Telecom,” which addresses just these issues.

Let us know what you think in the comments below.

On today’s Telephony 2.0 radar:

- Home page service Pageflakes sold itself today (a nice move in the midst of general Web 2.0 slowdown). Probably wouldn’t be a bad time for managers at telco Web portal decisions to do some bargain shopping. Pageflake’s component/widget-based approach to the user start page is pretty much the de facto standard and the way Google, Yahoo and Microsoft users start their day. The biggest remaining start page indie: NetVibes.

- Verizon handed off its mobile/online advertising to AOL’s ad agency, staying far clear of the battles between Google and Microsoft/Yahoo.

- Google and Salesforce.com announced an integrated product offering today, perhaps the least surprising pairing in the history of the Internet. Both are squarely focused on software-as-a-service and beating Microsoft, making them natural allies and perhaps signaling a future acquisition. Both also have an “app-named” Web development platform, Google’s AppEngine and Salesforce’s AppExchange.

- Three simple reasons why telcos can breathe easy that VoIP-over-wifi won’t disrupt service revenues: VoIP user interfaces are (too often) not integrated into the handset; running a VoIP app kills cycle time and battery life; and at least for U.S. domestic calls, the savings aren’t that great (though international calls, a huge target for calling cards and VoIP services, are a different matter).

- Finally, if telcos aren’t dipping into Google’s search war chest, others (Apple, Firefox, etc) certainly will….check out this map that shows Google’s cloud/data centers around the world….a nice wrap-up of rumors and realities for the soon-to-come 3G Apple iPhone….