434 unfortunate GrandCentral users have received email notices that their phone numbers will change this week. It’s a shame because one of the oft-touted niceties of GC is the ability to use the same phone number for life. If you remember, Google announced their acquisition of GrandCentral last month.

So what exactly happened? The GrandCentral blog has an explanation:

[...] One of our smaller underlying carriers (which we had been using prior to the Google acquisition), which had been reliably providing similar services for years (and provided numbers and connectivity to lots of other providers)–sent us a notice that they’d be exiting certain markets and disconnecting some phone numbers in 30 days. This caught us by surprise and although we were not happy about this, there was no way we could stop them from doing this. [...]

[...] We’re doing everything we can to ensure that the carriers we’re now using, post-acquisition, are large, reliable, and committed to providing these services long term [...]

Via GigaOM. (I recommend reading GigaOM’s coverage. Also, I just added them to the GPhoneholic blogroll.)