What if the internet goes down?
- The short answer
- Your office internet going down does not stop calls reaching an AI receptionist, because the forwarding happens at your carrier rather than in your building. GreetKeeper is reached that way, so a broadband failure at your end leaves the answering path intact. What it does break is your own ability to read transcripts until the connection returns.
The longer answer
Forwarding has a genuine advantage over an on-site system here. The rule lives on the network rather than in your building.
A hosted phone system in your office is the opposite case: no internet means no desk phones, and calls need somewhere else to land.
That is exactly the failure an assistant covers, because the calls keep being answered while your building is dark.
What each kind of outage actually does
Your broadband failing: calls still reach the assistant and are still answered. You read the transcripts later, from a phone on mobile data if you want them now.
A power cut at your office: same shape, with the addition that your desk phones are down too. The forwarding rule does not care.
Your mobile out of signal: transfers to that number will not connect, so the fallback you set matters. A message with a callback number is the usual answer.
A problem at the vendor's end: plan for this one. A carrier-level fallback to your own number keeps working when nothing else does.
Set that fallback before you need it. Test it once. Thirty minutes of work covers the outage people actually notice.
A storm takes out a dental office at 2pm
Say your dental office runs on a hosted VoIP phone system, and a storm cuts the power at 2pm on a Wednesday. The desk phones go dark because they need your network. Your main number still exists in your provider's cloud, which can see that none of your phones are registered.
What happens next depends on a setting you made months ago, or didn't. Most hosted systems have a failover rule for unreachable phones. If yours points at the assistant, a patient calling at 2:10 has her call answered and her Thursday cleaning rebooked, while your team stands around in a dark hallway. Without the rule, she hears a fast busy signal or a generic mailbox.
You read the afternoon's transcripts on your cell over mobile data. When power returns at 4:30, the phones register again and everything goes back to normal without anyone touching a setting.
Set the unreachable rule, then prove it works
Mobile lines have the same idea under a different name. Alongside no-answer and busy forwarding there's a third condition, not reachable, which covers a dead battery or no signal. On carriers using GSM codes it's set with **62* followed by the number and #. Test it by switching your phone to airplane mode and calling yourself from another phone.
On a hosted system, look in the admin dashboard for failover, unreachable or unregistered routing. Pull the network cable from one desk phone as a test and call its extension.
Keep a card in your wallet or taped inside a cabinet with three things on it: the forwarding number, the codes to set and cancel each forward, and your carrier's support line. You can't look those up when the internet is down and your phone is on one bar.
Plan for the day the fault is ours. We publish no uptime figure. If transcripts stop arriving during a normally busy hour, place a test call. When the assistant doesn't answer, cancel the forward with the code on your card, and your own phone rings again within a minute.
How GreetKeeper handles it
Forwarding is configured at your carrier, so calls reach GreetKeeper without touching your office network.
GreetKeeper publishes no uptime figure and offers no service level agreement, because nothing has been measured that would justify one.
That is precisely why the carrier fallback matters. Point it at a mobile you will answer, and you have a layer under anything we could promise.
Outage questions
Do I need internet for it to answer calls?
No. Forwarding happens on the carrier's network, so your connection is irrelevant to whether a call gets answered.
What if the service itself is down?
Set a fallback at your carrier so calls land on your own number instead. That rule runs on the network and survives almost everything.
Will I lose call records during an outage?
Calls answered are recorded as normal. What you lose is access while your own connection is down, which returns with it.
Hear it take one of your calls
Two minutes, your own scenario, no card.