Vonage Outage - December 14 - 15, 2007

Posts: 816 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Jun 08, 2007 Posts: 816

My Vonage in Cincinnati is back up.

Posts: 168 · Posted: Sat Dec 15, 2007 11:27 am Post subject:

Mspoet30, notice that Lazerus has a whopping one post to his credit. Anyone can put Sr. engineer in their signature. I highly doubt he is who he claims, he's probably just a troll.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2007 Posts: 1

I am in the Los Angeles area with V business lines. I am a telecom manager. I have many accounts with V that I manage. The entire LA area had two distinct outages. The first started around 8:30 AM PST and lasted until 11:50 AM PST. This outage stil allowed for outbound calls, although the call setup time was long, and it allowed for inbound VONAGE calls. 90% of inbound from the PSTN (public network) resulted in "trouble" recordings and inbound ringing with caller ID but no caller on the line. I received a call back from India Tier 2 support around 1:00PM telling me problem was resolved. They even issued a credit for 4 hours of down time. The second outage started at 2:45 PM PST. It was a total failure causing no response from routers and all calls failing. It was finnaly resolved around 8:00 PM PST. I spoke with the Account Management group at 4:5PM PST and they said their TROUBLE BOARD said the LA, Indianapolis and UK were up. All subscribers needed to reboot. I did that with my router and indeed service worked, but only for 15 minutes, when once again it failed. None of the FEATURES, Network Unavailablity, Call Forward or Voice Mail functioned during the second outage. Although this is the worst outage in my 4 years with V, I am recommending staying. The price, features and normally good service is still better than the AT&T's, Verizon and other carriers. I am in the phone business and I remember issues that took out AT&T and Verizon for an entire day.

Posts: 73 · Full Forum Member Joined: Mar 19, 2006 Posts: 73

coley wrote:

lol if it wasnt so irritatin it would be funny... has anyone else thought it was a prank caller, i was shoutin down the phone sayin oh well if u want to pay to listen to silence go ahead! till i realised it was a vonage fault... haha.. then calls my friend had made ten minutes earlier kept comin thru

I am SO Glad that my phone apparently isn't doing the phantom thing as well as just being offline!

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2007 Posts: 7

As I've already posted in a different thread, the most annoying thing is that V didn't notify the possible problems this could generate.
I am talking mainly about the phantom calls.
They drove me crazy until 6AM this morning when finally I figured it out thanks to this forum.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2007 Posts: 3

Fully expected to get flamed - thanks for not letting me down Very Happy

And what - having only the one post to my credit makes me a liar and a troll? I stumbled across this forum due to this outage, as I'm sure many have, and there are probably quite a few new members who have only one or two posts to their name.

But perhaps I came on a bit strong. Humble apologies to anyone else who has been emotionally scarred by my comments.

I have two posts now - so I'm changing my signature:

Lazarus
Vice-President, Research and Developement Division

(if you didn't have a contingency plan, you're still an idiot Smile

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2007 Posts: 4

It is interesting how we the consumers need to have a backup plan for Vonage VOIP outages... Should Vonage not have a backup plan for restoring service as well?

I agree that Vonage Customer Service/Support is less than desireable or even helpful during non-crisis (outage) times.

I am willing to bet that this current problem is due to new code or a hardware/firmware upgrade that was introduced to the Vonage network that somehow failed and the backout procedure failed as well.

I saw this happen in Las Vegas back in October of this year where there was a database migration that failed and impacted all the Bellagio/MGM properties for 7+ days... It took 8+ hours to check in and the whole room turnover process had to be done manually on paper.... It must have cost them $$Millions$$ in make goods to keep the patrons on the properties.

Needless to say I doubt if some senior IT staff will still be employed by Vonage come the first of the year...

What will Vonage do to make good on this current outage.... I am not sure... My guess would be as little as financially impactful as they are at year end on the books and probably cannot afford a hit. The stock market on Monday will probably clobber them... Which will cause some missing Vonage people come Jan 1.

So where do we as the consumers go from here?...
Has anyone checked to see if the SoftPhone works?
Is it worth purchasing in this instance?
Should I go back to using 2 tin cans and string?

It would be nice to make a few routine phone calls NOT from my per minute backup plan...

This is my first time to really be impacted as a Vonage customer in my 4 years with them... I don't think I will jump ship over this but I will definately check my alternatives again...

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2007 Posts: 4

I too found this forum due to this outage...

Posts: 73 · Full Forum Member Joined: Mar 19, 2006 Posts: 73

Ok,
I rebooted and still no phone. How do I tell if it's due to Vonage still having it's issues vs the typical problems that I have here with my phone not connecting to Vonage and wanting to be reset (2-3 times a week?

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2007 Posts: 3

Damn! Sushi sounds really good right now, too....
(I'd call my local sushi joint, but I have no other phone than my Vonage...)

Congratulations on your second post Sushi. I find that I can now take what you say seriously Very Happy

Here's a real question for the group - does anyone know of a good, reliable (affordable) provider that I can trunk to? SIP or otherwise? I wouldn't mind ditching Vonage for a good endpoint for my CCM lab.

Lazarus
President, Sales and PR.