Google Voice: Should an Internet phone service experience down-time?

Looks like Google Voice was experiencing some growing pains yesterday. The free service saw some outages reported by TechCrunch that left some users without access to their Voice service.

Starting around 2:30 PM PST yesterday Google Voice was experiencing some trouble. By 4:00PM the problems had been resolved. Google Voice service had been interrupted for about 90 minutes. The TechCrunch editors experienced outbound calls ringing endlessly, while others ended with the fated "This Call Cannot Be Completed" message. They also found that inbound calls weren't getting through.

A few commenters complained that if they really are supposed to feel comfortable giving out their Google Voice number as the best way to contact them, the service can't experience outages like this. Of course, as some have pointed out, the service is free so can you really complain? How many times can the service go down before Google Voice users look elsewhere? What do you think?

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