There have been a number of discussions internally about the two outages this week. Needless to say, we are very disappointed in our handling of the situation. Although there are some external factors we don’t control, there are many that we do, and we clearly have room to improve. We’ve listened to all the feedback that the community has been kind enough to share and I want to take a moment to go over some of the steps that we are taking to improve communication about major outages and how we plan to mitigate/avoid them in the future.
Communication
- We have closed a loophole that prevented the product marketing team from being immediately notified about major outages during off-hours. This prevented us from responding in the forums in a timely manner this morning.
- We are adding a mechanism for us to display outage notifications on our homepage and Lounge login page. The notification will be displayed at the top of the home page and link to our status in the forums. This should be live tomorrow.
- We have created an official ooma_status twitter feed. You can now find us at twitter.com/ooma_status. This gives you RSS and SMS notification options as well.
- We will send outage notification e-mails to customers who are subscribed to our marketing communication list. If you are not subscribed, you can do so here: www.ooma.com/contact/. Be sure to click the “I currently own an ooma system” checkbox. This is the only opt-in list we can use right now where we can safely send tens of thousands of e-mails without getting blacklisted. In the future, we will consider allowing separate opt-in’s for outage vs marketing notifications.
Mitigation/Prevention
- We are adding a second upstream Internet provider. We have hardware on order, hope to have it live next week.
We are doubling the capacity of our provisioning systems so we can accelerate the rate of recovery. That should be live by the end of the week.
- We have found two issues that prevented the ooma Hub from automatically recovering during the last two outages. The fix is being tested as we speak and will remove the need for a manual power cycle.
- We are adjusting our back-off and retry mechanisms to prevent the Hubs from placing undue load on our system during outage recovery. That should be complete by the end of the week.
- Longer term, we are planning to add a second data center in the Midwest/East Coast.
No doubt there will always be room for improvement, and we will continue to look to the community for feedback.
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Glad to hear an effort is being made to correct any future problems. I especially like your Twitter feed you added. With services of this type (new business coupled with new technology) those who are first adopters are usually the most vocal. So it’s nice that Ooma has seen the wisdom that other companies have with similar services and have created an open dialogue with their customer base.
Keep up the hard work!!!
This is the type of communication I was hoping for. I’m sticking with Ooma for now.
Let’s not kid ourselves – most customers are very nervous about a future date where Ooma doesn’t exist, and we have to find another alternative. There probably isn’t a single customer who hasn’t calculated their “break even point”, where the cost of the Ooma is eclipsed by the savings in reduced landline service costs.
Ooma will continue to be subjected to an escalated level of scrutiny because of this fear. It’s posts like these that help to put the fire out more quickly.
Thanks again.
Thanks ooma team for keeping us informed on your short and long term fixes. I, as an ooma customer, want to see you succeed. I have the premiere service, and plan to continue it next year. I know you guys were jumping through the hoops to get us back on-line, and I appreciate all your efforts. Don’t let a “few” negative comments posted in your forum get you down. We are all adults here, and we all understand this is not a perfect world, and sometimes things happen beyond our comtrol.
Take care and good luck!
I was OK with the outage, It’s a free service things like this will happen. I love OOMA and think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, I think that you should advertise on TV. Get more videos on YouTube on how all the features work.
As a Help Desk technician, I can appreciate the frustration on both ends during the recent outages. When things go wrong, the best recourse is to try and understand the details and figure out ways to improve for the future.
The folks at ooma did that and learned some good lessons and are putting corrective measures in place. They also learned a hard lesson that it is always, always, important to communicate with your customers as soon as you know problems are occuring.
I can accept that outages occur. Going forward, ooma now has several ways to communicate such outages to its users. If nothing else comes of these outages, that’s a definite win for us.
In closing, I’ve been an ooma customer since the early days and have consistently been impressed by them. They are not perfect, but they did own up to their shortcomings, put correction actions in place, and are learning to communicate more with their users. That’s as much as anyone can ask for and is certainly head and shoulders above the competition.
I am very impressed so far. Initialy had a problem activating and was helped by tech support. Did not have to wait for than 1 minute….
Then I did more browsing and googling and noticed the outage reports in the forums….
I am glad to have found this blog too and this type of message.
As an early adopter, I understand that things don’t always go right at first, but it is in how challenges are responded to and dealt with that makes the difference between success and failure when it comes to customer retention.
Thank you
We’re very interested in the OOMA. The only concern thus far would be in the call blocking feature. It would be nice if there were other options such as: No message at all, or one of our choosing.
As for the Premier service, how many numbers can be ported?
@Rob
With an annual subscription to Premier, you can port one number for free. Each additional number can be ported for $39.99.
If you plan on using more than two numbers with your Premier service, an additional number can be added for $4.99/mo.
I cannot echo the postive comments added by others. I’m once again experiencing an Ooma outage this morning. Is it too much to ask for someone to post this info on your website? You can blast all the notification emails you want but a simple note on the website would suffice. I’m a new Ooma user and so far, the experience leaves a lot to be desired. I’d like to see some visible changes and quick. Reliability seems to be non-existent. Not happy with the service! Also, have you considered expanding your customer service hours? Not all of us users are on Pacific Time.
@Shibani
There have been no ooma outages since last week – were you able to verify your Internet connection was working OK? How frequently are you seeing your ooma system going up and down?
If you would like, I can have support follow up with you to help diagnose this problem further.
I am a very recent user – having bought one through Costco. So, I get 90 days to try this out.
Once I LEAVE Ooma [if I leave Ooma that is], how many days of free “numbebr forwarding” do I get – like “1-XXX-777-OOMA is not in service – the new number is 1-XYZ-THURMAN” or something like that ?
Thanks,
The B-Man, and I posted this message at 3:37AM Pacific on a Saturday – intentionally – to see how long Ooma takes to respond. I will post results here.
@B-Man
If you decide to discontinue using ooma, you can setup the Multi-Ring feature to call forward your ooma number to another phone number you wish.
The Multi-Ring feature is only active if you have Premier service. So if decided not to sign up for Premier, you could call forward for free until your trial runs out.
I bought my ooma about a month ago. So far this is heaven. I did HAVE to pay for Internet + voice since my Inernet was tied to my phone number with dsl. Since the dsl provider has had so many customers drop they allowed people to decouple the two and now I just have Internet thus the switch to ooma. This is a GREAT service. I love just picking up my phone hearing the dial tone now knowing I’m saving so much cash. I have told all my friends and family about it. The great thing is that if more people switch it saves ooma money since the devices just call from ooma box to ooma box over the Internet thus ensuring they can maintain their business model. It’s great that you guys post the outage stuff. Do more of that. Don’t be like magic jack and just have a site with advertisements.
I hear rumor that ooma is coming out with home automation and entertainment deices like linuxmce has. Keep using that open source stuff and giving us the goods man and I’ll keep buying. I can’t wait!
I’ve stumbled upon this website and it sounds interesting.
When will Ooma be available in Canada?
It looks like Ooma can only make free calls all over USA only.
Thanks. Nice response!
Ooma,
As an IT professional (and Ooma customer) who has dealt with his share of service outages with other technology vendors services and with my own network, I respect your acknowledgment of the service outage and admitting there are flaws which you are working to improve on.
Looking forward to seeing the new Ooma hub hit the shelves in the future. Keep up the good work and keep telephony free!
you are now becoming one of the big dogs of VOIP service provider. Such outage is totally unacceptable to paying customers. There’s no excuse for the outage when it could have been immediately mitigated if not fully prevented. You should not rely on twitter to tell you about the outage coz that only means customer are already impacted and are already complaining hence, bad reviews/news! GET A SNIFFER ! (netscout.com). You will get notified by this very intelligent piece of software before if not way before an outage occurs. No need to hire high paying network engineers who are mostly reactive. This software is proactive. We use it here where I work (TMobile). Big dogs have it. You should have one too. MORE POWER TO YOU! TOTALLY LOVE YOUR PRODUCT! I’ve been asking all people I know to get OOMA i.e. broadcast them in my facebook/friendster/online forums.. So please don’t get me wrong! Make us proud!
Sincerely,
Joriz
(former vonage customer)
What would an outgoing call to Canada cost?
What do I do if I need three phones in my home- not lines just phones?
If I cancel and go back to my regular phone service, do I need to pay the phone number change fee again to you or another provider?
What are reasons a ported number would be helpful?
Do you have any plans on offering a business plan for a service of this type at a later date?
we are a small travel agency opoerating out of our home/and office. switched to ooma, droopped verizon $400 per month worht. ooma is working wonderfully, you can have a little down time. we have saved so much money in two months. we are buyin oom’s for all ouir kids and inclukding the premier service. this lhelps yo guys and wel need to do that. thanks for the service . marvin, KI&M Travel, Inc Zephyrhills Fl 33542
How do I get ooma? How is ooma different than Vonage?