Ooma nationwide outage makes the news

[AppleTree]

Ooma nationwide outage makes the news

VoIP service Ooma goes down nationwide
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 ... nationwide

Ooma had an outage on August 17, 2011 in which there was no comment by the company on its social media network until hours later. I am sure many of you tried to contact Ooma via their support number or the official Ooma website only to find those down as well.

What I hope comes out of this event is:

1) Ooma moves there support forum to another webhost so that outages won't affect its ability to communicate with its customers.

2) Ooma hires a college kid who knows what Twitter and Facebook are and how to use it to communicate service issues. This would eliminate thousands of support calls to Ooma trying to find out what is going on.

Ignoring Twitter in which thousands posted on the outage to prevent embarrassing Retweets like this from harming the company reputation.

Ooma Phone Service Goes Down, So Does the Website. Company Sleeps Through It.

Source: http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/407 ... hrough-it/

3) Ooma uses the term EST or PST when announcing times because there are several time zones in the USA.

I love Ooma as do you all, however, the lack of communication yesterday was unexplainable.

[DTR]

The regional ABC stations said a blurb about on the evening news yesterday in my area.

Maybe Ooma will realize this is a HUGE PR problem for them, for sure it the news outlets are going to start telling the world.

Ooma may have serious problems on the managment side of things (they did go through 5 execs in 2010), and that will eventually effect our phone service and their livelyhood in the market place.

[2spirit]

An outage is never good. And the channels of communication definitely need improvement. But I seem to remember that over the past few years, some major websites have gone down . . . (Amazon, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and GMail, i.e.) . . . some multiple times and some for extended periods. And as far as I know, all these are still prospering . . . even after the media attention these outages attracted. Ooma is a small company working with a miniscule budget in comparison to these others . . . doing their best to provide phone service at a great value to their customers. Let us hope that some lessons in the importance of communication were learned . . . but really, we need to try to keep this server downtime in perspective.

[EricJRW]

So while logical that ooma would use its own service for its corporate (and support) lines, maybe this in reality is not such a good idea.

[lbmofo]

. . . but really, we need to try to keep this server downtime in perspective.

Amen to that. Let's give Ooma some credit for keeping it up and running since 2009.
If you count 3 hrs for this outage, YTD uptime is 99.945%, if no more outages by year end, the uptime would be 99.966%.
Even if Ooma has another outage for 5+ hours before year end, the uptime would still be 99.9%. That's pretty darn good compared to my dad's landline sitting at 99.1% uptime right now (2 full days of outage)
I trust that Ooma will continue to learn from incidents like these and improve in the future.

[thecgmguy]

I don't like outages but I can completely understand that they can happen. I'm OK with that as long as they are rare occurrences.

What bothers me is that, in this case, hours went by without any feedback from Ooma. I want fast and proactive notification so before I even start looking into things I can rest assured that they're working on it.

ooma_status on twitter is a step in the right direction but it's only as good as their willingness to provide quick updates.

-M

[murphy]

I don't like outages but I can completely understand that they can happen. I'm OK with that as long as they are rare occurrences.

What bothers me is that, in this case, hours went by without any feedback from Ooma. I want fast and proactive notification so before I even start looking into things I can rest assured that they're working on it.

ooma_status on twitter is a step in the right direction but it's only as good as their willingness to provide quick updates.

-M

Several years ago I had a 19 hour outage on my Verizon landline. At no time did they notify me of anything. When I called (I have a backup phone system) they couldn't tell me what the problem was or when it would be fixed. The entire area was without phone service. The Verizon equipment was calling 911 (and I later found out 411) from everyones phone in the area. The police were not happy since they had to respond to all of the bogus calls. They came to my house three times during the outage. Verizon never apologized for the problems.

Ooma has never caused me this much aggravation.

I also found all of the "chicken littles" on the dslreports forum claiming that Ooma had folded quite amusing.

[lbmofo]

I also found all of the "chicken littles" on the dslreports forum claiming that Ooma had folded quite amusing.

That place seems to have more Ooma users than here

[lbmofo]

This outage was a "cloud failure?"

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/datacenter/da ... vendor/974

[EricJRW]

I also found all of the "chicken littles" on the dslreports forum claiming that Ooma had folded quite amusing.

That was the first thing that came to my mind... Especially since the .com was down and there were no tweets.