VoIP Forum

US voip services Ooma, which offers what it says is a virtually free home phone service, lost connectivity in its network on Wednesday for about seven hours.


According to reports, the VoiP providers entire network collapsed, stopping all inbound and outbound calls.


The Ooma voip services was interrupted from about 5:40am Pacific time and its corporate website was attacked by a Dedicated Denial of Service attack just minutes later, which left Ooma with no way of alerting customers.


Like other incidents reported in the last week (Amazon Web Services and Microsoft suffered serious outages in Dublin), Ooma put its network outage down to a power failure in part of its data center.


Oomas service was interrupted following a network outage due to an extremely rare power failure at a portion of our data center which also affected several other companies, Ooma said in a blog posting Wednesday.


Ooma said it was working with its data center provider to put provisions in place to ensure this does not happen again.


Ooma is a start up based in Palo Alto, which formed in 2007. The free US phone call model came to fame through the casting of its creative director Ashton Kutcher (who is no longer at the company).


The voip services required customers purchase an Ooma hub which allows them to make the calls, an answering machine like device which allows them to connect to the service. This pays for calls up front.


This is not the first time Ooma has lost service. In 2009 it lost service for six hours after it said a fiber optic cable serving one of the data centers housing its servers had been cut, in 2010 it also suffered an outage.