VOIP System Outage

Sarah Moore shares a story about making a seemingly small change to her business's phone system that turned into a disaster.

"When I first bought the business, I thought some things were really simple to change. We had hardwired phones in our office with cables everywhere because we had all these offices and conference rooms. I thought, 'We're almost in 2020 here, what are we doing with this? We should just change our phones to VOIP phones so I can see everything remotely.'

It seemed like not a big thing, but it was one of the biggest mistakes I made. Our phone number is extremely important - people look at the domain, that's great, but our number is used by our biggest customers and new customers. We actually have multiple phone lines - that one 800 number is forwarded to like 10-12 lines.

Spectrum may have lost our phone lines mid-porting, and our phones were down for almost a week. It was a huge deal because as a new owner, people started thinking 'Did they go out of business?' because our phones were dead.

I'm so traumatized by the experience that to this day, I will not change our phone lines. If you think something is small, it can actually be pretty big."