VoicePulse used Twitter to Update their Network Outage
VoicePulse, a New Jersey based VoIP Provider for residential and business consumers, experienced outages early starting Monday morning. Although the VoicePulse website is down, the company reported via their Twitter account at 10:30am EST:
VoicePulse is currently experiencing a partial service outage due to a generator explosion at one of our NYC datacenters.
At 10:49 they updated:
Engineers are on-site, but police & fire activity is currently preventing access to the building. SIP termination via SJC is working.
As of this post, VoicePulse incoming calls are still unable to connect, however outbound SIP calls can be terminated through their west coast gateways. Although having a single point of failure is very bad, we have to give VoicePulse credit for using Twitter to notify users of the situation.
Update:
At 11:24 am they advised:
VoicePulse Connect users that have old configs can view the correct sip.conf (with west coast peers) at http://www.pastebin.ca/1291545
and at 11:25 am:
Inbound carriers generally send calls via IP. Carriers are being contacted to make emergency changes to route inbound calls via SJC IPs.
At 12:11 pm:
Registrations restored to JFK/SJC. Waiting on larger carriers to move traffic to SJC IPs. Calls via smaller carriers moved already.
Last Updates:
VoicePulse posted these updates at 2:30 pm:
Website is up. VoicePulse Connect customers using JFK/SJC should be up and running for inbound/outbound.
If you didn’t move your SIP traffic off connect01, 02, 03 when we introduced SJC & JFK, you can access the sample configs and module now.
Forcing users to change their PBX configuration is, in my opinion, far worse than a single point of failure.
How many businesses that have elected to deploy Asterisk PBXs directly have the ability to change their configuration? Most small businesses, at least those I have worked with, hire a consultant to avoid on-going costs of hiring a ‘PBX’ tech.
I have specifically engineered NuFone to never require customers to change their PBX settings… especially temporarily, to work around an inevitable outage.
I will give Voicepulse credit for using Twitter to spread the word. PNuFone should do the same.
JerJer
NuFone
22 Dec 08 at 11:51 am
Well said. We also give them credit for using Twitter. But, asking customers to make temp changes and having a single point of failure like this… unacceptable.
Patrick and Fred
22 Dec 08 at 12:00 pm
To clarify, the configuration files posted are not a temporary fix. They are the sample configurations that have been posted on the website for more than six months and represent the correct SIP configuration for VoicePulse service.
Businesses that don’t have in-depth knowledge of Asterisk are able to use the VoicePulse auto-configuration module which no other provider offers. The module ensures that their PBX is using the most recent configurations with minimal user intervention.
Users that were properly configured were least exposed to this unexpected outage.
VoicePulse
22 Dec 08 at 12:44 pm
Thank you for the clarification. So far we are hearing reports of incoming still not working. Do you have an ETA for your customers?
Patrick and Fred
22 Dec 08 at 12:50 pm