The interferometric LIGO detectors have recently measured the first direct gravitational-wave signal from what has been interpreted as the inspiral, merger and ringdown of a binary system of black holes. The signalto-noise ratio of the measured signal is large enough to leave little doubt that it does refer to the inspiral of two massive and ultracompact objects, whose merger yields a rotating black hole. Yet, the quality of the data is such that some room is left for alternative interpretations that do not involve black holes, but other objects that, within classical general relativity, can be equally massive and compact, namely, gravastars. We here consider the hypothesis that the merging objects were indeed gravastars and explore whether the merged object could therefore be not a black hole but a rotating gravastar. After comparing the real and imaginary parts of the ringdown signal of GW150914 with the corresponding quantities for a variety of gravastars, and notwithstanding the very limited knowledge of the perturbative response of rotating gravastars, we conclude it is not possible to model the measured ringdown of GW150914 as due to a rotating gravastar.PACS numbers: 04.25. Dm, 04.25.dk, 04.30.Db, 04.40.Dg, 95.30.Lz, 95.30.Sf, 97.60.Jd Introduction. Gravastars were proposed in 2004 by Mazur and Mottola [1] as an ingenious alternative to the end state of stellar evolution for very massive stars, that is, as an alternative to black holes. The name gravastar comes from "gravitational vacuum condensate star" and it was proposed to be almost as compact as a black hole, but without an event horizon or a central singularity. This object would be formed as gravitational collapse brought the stellar radius very close to its Schwarzschild radius and as a phase transition would form a de Sitter core. This "repulsive" core stabilises the collapse, while the baryonic mass ends as a shell of stiff matter surrounding the core. Despite their uncertain and rather exotic origin, gravastars are perfectly acceptable solutions of the Einstein equations within classical general relativity.Considerable effort has been dedicated to study gravastars, for instance exploring different possibilities for its structure [2,3], generalising the solution [4-6] and investigating possible observational signatures [7][8][9]. As alternatives almost indistinguishable from a black hole in terms of electromagnetic radiation, gravastars have attracted the attention of those who wished for a spacetime solution without the issues brought by the existence of singularities and event horizons. Work was also done in order to assess its viability, in particular looking for instabilities in the solutions. Hence, there have been studies on the stability against radial oscillations [2,10] and axial and polar gravitational perturbations [11][12][13]. For slowly rotating gravastars, scalar perturbations in the context of the ergoregion instability were also studied [14,15]. None of these works has pointed out to a response that would allow one to discard...