Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Going back about a week now, Google Voice users have been experiencing message delivery errors.
- The errors pop up seemingly at random and point users to Voice’s acceptable use policy.
- One theory suggests they could be tied to industry-wide changes to how texts from non-mobile numbers are handled.
Update, February 18, 2025 (02:09 PM ET): We still haven’t heard back from Google in direct response to our inquiry, but a recently updated Google Workspace status report suggests that whatever was causing this Google Voice issue has now been resolved. Indeed, we have yet to see the error for failed message delivery pop back up in our testing today.
Original article, February 18, 2025 (05:30 AM ET): Is Google Voice ever going to catch a break? Google acquired the telephony service all the way back in 2007 when it was still going by GrandCentral, and while we’ve known it under the Voice name for the past 15 years now, it’s increasingly felt like progress was slowly leaving the service behind. New features are an all-too-rare addition, and even iPhones are now able to communicate over RCS while Voice still can’t. Now, almost to add insult to injury, Google Voice users are having their messages blocked and being informed they’re violating Google’s policies, seemingly at random.
Over the course of the past week or so, a growing number of Voice users have been complaining about errors they occasionally experience when attempting to send messages. In our testing we were able to verify this through Voice’s web interface, where after a few texts going through we’d all of a sudden find one blocked with a notice informing us, “Message not delivered. See Acceptable Use Policy.”
Clicking through to Google’s support docs doesn’t offer much in the way of help, but over on the Google Voice Reddit sub a stickied post from moderator BluesCatReddit makes it clear that this is far from an isolated incident. The community over there is trying to work out what’s behind this recent spate of Voice errors, and while we haven’t yet confirmed any specific cause, there are a few popular theories in the running.
Perhaps the most compelling — and also quite concerning — theory suggests that this is all a consequence of new industry practices towards texts originating from non-mobile sources, also outlined in a post from BluesCatReddit a couple months back. While the theory presented there does seem to track, and could explain some of what we’re seeing from Voice now, it feels quite odd that Google would imply that message delivery failures resulting from this are violations of Voice’s acceptable use policy. It’s possible this could just be inarticulate messaging on Voice’s part, however.
Ultimately, we may not know what’s really going on here until Google pipes up and confirms things for itself. We’ve reached out to the company hoping to get some comment, and will update you if and when it has anything to share.
