No Dialtone!! Anybody else having this problem this morning?

Posts: 19 · Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 2:42 pm Post subject:

Now this is starting to become total BS! I was up and down all morning then my fax line was fine and my voice line was able to make outgoing calls but incoming calls went to never never land. Now I'm stiing here watching the green light flash on my VT1000.

I just checked the dashboard on the website and there are no service announcements there at this time.

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 23, 2007 Posts: 12

2:42pm.

Great, now callers get "The person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this moment. Please try your call again later." So now my coworkers and clients probably think I'm out slacking off in the snow! Unreal...

Posts: 1715 · Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 2:52 pm Post subject:

Djinn wrote:

I'm not faulting Vonage for the outage... When the U.S. telephone network was in its infancy, I'm sure they had their share of problems. <snip>

You may not be willing to, but I'll 100% fault Vonage on this one. Their system failed, no question about that part. VoIP is a mature technology now. Emergency services (fire/police/EMS), hospitals, and large corporations now use VoIP in critical areas without downtime. The flexible nature of VoIP makes it very easy to re-route and have backup servers.

Now, if Vonage was enduring conditions similar to what some of my facilities underwent during the FL hurricanes (roofs ripped off, 6 FEET of water in the 1st floor of a building, 130+mph sustained winds, gusting to 160mph, 2 weeks without power), I'd have some sympathy...BUT, even with all of that, I didn't experience downtime. I only have a couple of people working with me and we're small beans. Vonage has 100s of people working in IT, plenty of resources to build a redundant network. They apparently have decided not to, from the appearance of today's outages and their response.

jungleland wrote:

Use your head...Pretty much every single vonage user is going to the website for info, that is overloading the servers...Make sense?

Not really. Their website should be capable of handling it. This certainly is not the first outage Vonage has ever had, so they should know what to expect. Wouldn't it be great if the water & power companies worked like Vonage did today? There goes your morning shower, because you know from ~6am-9am is when the majority of people get ready in the morning, so there wouldn't be enough water to go around. Likewise for power. Imagine having a major heatwave come through, only to have the power company go, "We didn't know everyone would want to use their air con when it gets hot out." Or considering Vonage's response today, there'd be NO response. Unacceptable. I find it even more unacceptable considering my work is very similar, so I understand the challenges they face.

As an aside, I'm not bashing Vonage here for the sake of bashing Vonage. Customer service and planning, mainly lack thereof, is something I've been complaining about since day 1. I'd also like to point out that other companies have had issues similar to this. Florida Power & Light was totally unprepared to handle the devastation caused by Hurricane Wilma in 2005. Their customer service #'s were totally useless and unreachable. When you could get through, all you got was a recording stating the obvious, a hurricane went through. No estimates, nothing. Even the special # for mission-critical places (hospitals, fire stations, shelters, etc) didn't work.

Still some intermittent issues with Vonage for me (2:51pm)

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 14, 2007 Posts: 1

They must be having some serious issues the web site isn't even working correctly. My phone is all over the place and calling them or at least for today is worthless -- you can't leave a message and just get kicked off the call i.e "there is no one here to take your call". I wonder if Charter VOIP service is better the rates are the same.

Posts: 429 · Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 2:54 pm Post subject:

Status update.

Around 10:45 a.m. Eastern, our inbound and outbound service returned to normal.

However, around 2:15 p.m. we're back to no inbound or outbound calls again. Callers get fast busy from landlines, or dropped calls from cell. Outbound calls give us dead air and nothing more.

But hey, at least we have a dialtone....

Posts: 143 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Dec 22, 2005 Posts: 143

Hey VonageTPA, what does MVM stand for on this forum? and what does the TPA stand for?

Posts: 429 · Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 3:03 pm Post subject:

My guess is MVM is "most valuable member" (like sports MVP) and TPA stands for Tampa, since his sig lists Florida as his location.

Posts: 143 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Dec 22, 2005 Posts: 143

I was thinking "TelePhone Adapter" actually.

Posts: 429 · Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 3:07 pm Post subject:

Maybe. But it's common among the local folks around here to abbreviate Tampa as Tpa.

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 22, 2005 Posts: 2

Charlotte, NC here... My line is still down. Logging into my account I get this:

We apologize for any inconvenience, but we are currently
upgrading to provide you with better and faster service.

For assistance with your account, just call us toll-free at:

US: 1-VONAGE-HELP (1-866-243-4357)
UK: 0800-652-5099
CA: 1-877-272-0528

Please feel free to check back in just a bit.

Thank you for your patience and understanding!