On April 13th ooma experienced a service outage that affected all ooma customers. The outage came without notice and had many customers wondering what the problem was. According to this blog post on the ooma blog, these problems were not isolated to just ooma. The outage occurred between 11AM and 5PM pacific time. Instead of being without service for just a few minutes or even hours, some ooma customers were left without telephone service for over 5 hours.
Ooma is still a developing company and this outage isn’t settling very well with ooma customers. I, for one, was extremely disappointed that the outage occurred for so long. On top of that, ooma did not notify its subscribers via email, or even a posting to their website. Many customers became frustrated when they tried to call ooma support and received nothing but a busy signal. In order to properly handle the outage, ooma should have sent an email about the lack of service as soon as they had discovered it. Instead, ooma subscribers weren’t notified until late the next day when an apology and partial explanation went out.
The ooma outage information email as well as their blog post indicate where information about service status can be found.
“For future reference, all information and updates about outages are posted in the ooma service status section of our community forum. This is the best source of real-time information.”
I wasn’t aware of the forum before the event but I plan on paying close attention to it from now on.
Of course ooma is still a developing company and is in the technology field. We all know technology breaks and isn’t always that reliable. Hopefully ooma will learn from this and implement the most cost effective and time sensitive solutions as soon as possible to prevent a future incident such as this one.
Another problem I noticed with Ooma is that when it is down, callers are prompted to leave a message that Ooma users may not get for hours. I can understand that you wouldn't want a client calling and hearing that your business is using a dubious telephony product that goes down, but the fact that they may leave an important message expecting a prompt response is troubling, especially if someone is, for instance, waiting for a message from a prospective employer. While Ooma can't expect their service to experience a lot of downtime, they need to be better prepared for when it does happen. Ooma premium offers users the chance to have their voicemails forwarded to their email. They should automatically do this for non-premier users when there are outages.
A valid question indeed. The events of this week have led to some serious self-reflection and undoubtedly our customers deserve better. I've posted a follow-up blog entry that lays out our near-term action plan to mitigate and improve our handling of outages.
http://blog.ooma.com/2009/04/16/recent-outages-co…
Dennis Peng
VP, Product Management