We saw a major Skype outage that kept consumers without an important communication tool for more than 24 hours. The blogosphere had its own reaction to this outage. There were rumors about Russian hackers compromising the Skype service, which was promptly denied by Skype. This outage definitely brings into focus the question about whether VOIP is ready for prime time.

If we thought, Skype outage was the biggest problem to the VOIP scene in recent months, there are some more bad news about Grand Central, a company acquired by Google recently. Grand Central started with a promise to offer you a single phone number for life. Now there are reports about some customers getting mails informing them that their Grand Central phone number will be changed due to “quality” related issues. The customers have no choice but to accept the new number. This news will definitely make businesses think about the viability of using the Grand Central service for their business purposes. No business wants to change their number like this. These two incidents are definitely a setback to adaptation of VOIP in the business sector. The VOIP players have their task cut out in building trust with the customers and also to convince them that VOIP can be the voice solution that they are desperately looking for.

Update: Here is a post regarding the Grand Central issue. According to the blogger, Grand Central has offered to reimburse the money spent on printing business cards. This plays well into my commentary about building trust with the customers.