Vonage Outage, No Big Deal-UPDATED

Yesterday the Internet was abuzz with accounts of Vonage having an outage.

Well VoIP is Internet based, and from time to time, servers and routers do go down. And they get fixed.

Vonage spokeswoman, Brooke Schulz said, “Yesterday at 10.45 AM EDT Global Crossing, one of Vonage’s IP providers, experienced a data routing issue which effected the Vonage network. The issue was isolated to Global Crossing’s routing tables (we believe at this point, considering there was one circuit they were provisioning us that went down causing other secondary events), which prohibited Vonage data traffic from getting to its proper destination. During the outage, many of the systems failed over to alternate routes, enabling the Vonage network as a whole to send and recieve calls, however individual cutsomers’ success of making and recieving calls remained sporadic depending on where a particular customer was located on the Internet. The systems which were effected during the outage were: voicemail, voicemail email notification,vonage web login and network availability number. Network availability number did not work becase the inbound traffic from the phone network was being routed to the wrong place by Global Crossing. The problem was resolved around 12.15 PM EDT and has remained stable since then. “

I had an interesting problem yesterday. It seems as a result of the end of the cross carrier agreement between T-Mobile and Cingular here on the west coast, that once I got close to I-15 in San Diego that I could not get a signal that would let me dial or receive calls. It seems the AT&T (soon to be Cingular’s) network was overriding T-Mobile. Now with that problem, in one of the wireless world’s most penetrated markets no one got hysterical over it, calling it a black eye for VoIP like Ben Charney did on CNET’s News.com

When I first heard about the outage, I was working on a print job for a client at Kinkos. I checked the net, and called Vonage’s PR folks. I asked, was it Network or Data Center related. Seems no one asked that question until I asked, as my assumption was and as Brooke pointed out, a router table had gone wrong. They said it was a problem inside Global Crossing, but the backup system kicked in for some users.

I remember when this used to happen all the time with @HOME when my cable modem first went in back in the 90s. There wasn’t any back up. I would go hours without the Internet, having to use, oh gosh–dial up.

What is even more intriguing though is no one in the media has reported if any of the Vonage features kept working. The one that comes to mind is the Network Availability Number, which automatically route calls to an alternative number in case of an outage. Then there is Voice Mail. Logically, if the network routing was down Voice Mail should have automatically kicked in. But it didn’t. And that is hole in the Vonage network. I also bet they and other VoIP provider move rapidly to insure things like this don’t happen too often and that failsafe’s get put into play.

Sadly, I was away from the Vonage phone and I couldn’t run anytrue tests when the problem occured. But, I don’t have my knickers in an uproar over this. Candidly, I expect things like this to happen. It’s really no big deal.

At age 45 this week I’m old enough to remember the era before the cell phone and of one phone line in the house. I remember people calling back because there weren’t any answering machines (this was well before voice mail). The world survived. People called back who wanted to reach you.

Today we have people who have voice mail, phones that ring everywhere, messages that get taken digitally, and yet some folks just don’t return calls. What’s the big deal about a ninety minute outage that was likely caused by a router, made by a company that has had more routers fail than Vonage has had outages in 18 months.

I say, things must be really boring around the net if people have hissy fits over this one….chill. Go to the beach. Get away from the phones. If people really want to reach you, they will call you again.