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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Officials at Palo Alto-based VoIP provider ooma (www.ooma.com) and a data center operator in Atlanta, Georgia are pointing fingers at each other after ooma's systems went down Monday.
According to a San Francisco Business Times report, ooma went offline at about 11 am Pacific time and was down for most of the business day Monday, with the system coming back to nearly full strength by around 5 pm. Along with premium services, ooma provides phone service free with the purchase of a $250 ooma box, presumably leaving many businesses without telephone communications.
In a blog post, ooma product management vice president Dennis Peng wrote that all customers were affected and it was the result of Internet connectivity issues at ooma's upstream service provider, Internap Network Services (www.internap.com).
On Tuesday, however, Internap spokeswoman Debra Forrester told the SF Business Times that the problem was not at Internap. "There's no way around this. We've got a customer that wants to blame Internap for this outage," Forrester said in a voice message. "We did not have a network outage. No other customers experienced a network outage."
While Internap had no customer outages Monday, Forrester said later that the company would continue to investigate ooma's incident, possibly spurred on by an accusative email from ooma Chief Marketing Officer Rich Buchanan.
Buchanan wrote, "We have the network logs to show that their service was not performing to specification, and that subsequently caused our network outage. It's unfortunate that a network provider with the reputation that Internap has would stoop to such levels to avoid responsibility."
Data Center Knowledge blogger Rich Miller noted that Buchanan even used his Twitter feed to blame Internap for the problems.
While Forrester said it's still unclear whether it was Internap's or ooma's fault. "We will either find out it was indeed our problem, or they will find out it was them," she said.
Peng noted that ooma is taking measures to stop a similar event from happening again. "Discussions have already started on how to make the service resilient to a similar event in the future," Peng wrote. "ooma currently has one data center located in West Coast. We have planned to light up a second data center in the Midwest or East Coast this year, and this outage has served as a stark reminder for us to get moving on that."
Nevertheless, according to customers comments, ooma's finger pointing is not winning it any points, when the company could have provided more information for customers who couldn't make or receive calls. While it's reasonable that there be outages from time to time, according to customer dismay, not being able to contact customer support exacerbated a bad situation.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
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Comment by Anonymous on Thursday, April 16, 2009
Matters not who was at fault. Internap is the provider that ooma chose and ooma needs to shoulder responsibilty. When I signed up for the service I paid ooma and they are my provider end of story regardless of who they contract with for their backbone.