Vonage Outage - December 14 - 15, 2007

Posts: 168 · Posted: Sat Dec 15, 2007 12:39 pm Post subject:

lazarus wrote:

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

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

Your welcome....glad I didn't disappoint you.

You deserved to get flamed because anyone who enters a board for the first time and calls people idiots doesn't understand how to properly join a forum. Calling people names is really unnecessary. An intelligent response would be something like "you should always have a back up in case Voip goes down" not saying you're an idiot if you don't.

Try being polite. You'll get more respect that way.

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

You know, Lazarus, the thing of it is.... If this were just an outage, and the phone didn't work, no biggie, I see your point, and have 4 cell phones in the house I could use. This was not just an outage. I received no less than 150 phantom phone calls to not only my Vonage line, but both of my backup lines, at all hours of the night last night. Literally, they only way to get some sleep was to turn ALL of my phones off- i.e. the backups you speak of. In fact, while I naively stood on hold with Vonage, I had 17 missed calls from 3 different phantom numbers, which appeared to be my friends and co-workers trying to reach me. What is amazing to me, it that the only thing posted on the outage board is that you may have no dial tone. Vonage could have gone a long way to alleviate my personal frustration by being upfront about what the real symptoms might be yesterday evening, when they has "no service announcements" and yet their toll free number was all circuits busy there were so many calls.

P.S. - My first post 2 Wink

Posts: 5 · Posted: Sat Dec 15, 2007 1:08 pm Post subject:

Central Kentucky is back online with Vonage and working.

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

Beginning late Friday night, we experienced technical issues that have intermittently impaired service for some customers. We are working on resolving any remaining issues, and regret any inconvenience.

Charles Sahner
Vonage Spokesperson

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

Well I hate my job sometimes because I always have to look into the why's of what went wrong...

So looking at this from the outside in I found the Vonage career page for job listings... There are three pages of openings for analysts, engeineers and Oracle developers... all are at the Corp HQ in NJ... should be a few more openings added next week...
https://www.cytiva.com/von/cojobs_von.asp

Instead of directing your angst against the first CSR (customer service rep) to answer at the Vonage call center you should try contacting the people at the top... the board of directors
http://www.vonage.com/corporate/corp_bod.php

I am sure that will be as useful as complaining to the CSRs but should make you fell better... besides the scripts that the CSRs read from do not give them an option to deal with angry/combative customers... Only to say they are sorry...

(Something to note here: Everytime I've spoken to someone at the Vonage call center they have spoken English... I did not have to fight my way through a foreign accent or cultural issue... Thanks Vonage for employing US people)
Sounds like the call center is still in NJ, USA... A differnt dialect of English.. he he he
http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic5216.html

As of Friday Vonage stock was trading at $2.05... not too much further down it can go... but it can still go that direction... Read this as: Don't expect the customer experience or service to improve anytime soon...
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=VG&t=2y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=

Looking at the job postings I smell a database improvement gone bad and they are now struggling to back it out out or reinstall the database from backup tape (if a good one exists or the previous days tape can be found)... Had it been a hardware issue this service outage would have been rectified in 2-6 hours... just my guess

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

I am in the Atlanta area and the phone service has been down since last night. It only took me 15 minutes to get a csr on the phone, but she was of little help. She said to give them 24-48 hrs please. The message I get when I pick up the phone is "Your Vonage device cannot connect to the internet".

Posts: 63 · Full Forum Member Joined: Nov 02, 2007 Posts: 63

Check your Dashboard.....

Some customers may be experiencing an issue with no dial tone. Our engineers are aware of the issue and are working to resolve it as soon as possible.

We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience in this matter.
All the posts in the world won't fix the problem. Just chill out and wait for the problem to be resolved.

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

I am sure that the problem will be rectified... the question is when?

Imagine what will happen when BUSINESSES that rely on Vonage as a sole source of voice communication can't communicate with their customers if this goes on until Monday?

It would be easier to forgive or understand if it was related to weather or national catastrophy and happening to other Voip carriers... but no real details of this outage has been offered...

I imagine the plethora of multi-national techs and engineers huddled about a server rack or monitor scratching their heads and saying it is the software while the application developers drinking their coffee or diet coke say it is the hardware... Meanwhile management types are combing e-mails figuring out who they can blame other than themselves for this mess.

Complaining to customer service certainly does not help but apparently Vonage technicians and managment have been watching this forum... and hopefully sweating... as they see how unhappy the customer base is...

The real question is what is Vonange going to do about damage control? The problem I pointed out in Las Vegas cost a lot of money in convention and tourisim business...
JetBlue lost a lot of business due to poor procedures and communication with its customer base and payed for that dearly.

There is really no excuse for poor IT on the front end of Vonanges operations...

There is no such thing as bad publicity... Except maybe in this case...

Woowhooo Wowhoowhooowhooo

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

sethook wrote:

Check your Dashboard.....

All the posts in the world won't fix the problem. Just chill out and wait for the problem to be resolved.

My dashboard says that there are technical problems!
I got that. Even my grand-grand-ma would have gotten that.
Maybe it would have been "nicer" to tell the customers what kind of troubles they would have experienced (i.e. phantom calls at 3AM).
Maybe our posts won't fix the problem, but because I pay my bill every single month, I like to enjoy my right to have an opinion and to share it.
And this forum (not Vonage) has been very useful to understand what was going on.
So please don't tell me that I should live with the problem and chill out, because I am awake since 2.56AM thanks to a few dozens of phantom calls.
I am sorry but I cannot accept that.

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

I have lost my 646 area code Vonage line for over 24 hours now.

Questions:

1. Have any other 646 Vonage subscribers suffered ?

2. Is there a Vonage tech support email address to register loss of service for a particular Vonage number. (I don't want to spend hours of paid time on a cell phone calling CSRs).

Thanks to anyone who can help.