Who Pulled the Plug on Phone Power?
The "power" in Phone Power was missing on Wednesday, as the VoIP phone service provider suddenly lost connectivity. Phone Power customers were unable to make calls or contact the VoIP service provider, whose website was also down.
Luckily, the residential phone service has also tapped into the "power" (nyuk, nyuk, nyuk) of the Social Web — namely microblogging — and was able to get the word out via Twitter, posting this note about their status:
We are currently experiencing an issue that is impacting inbound/outbound calls and our website. Engineers are currently looking into it.
At this time, there is no ETA on when the phone service will be available again, but we imagine the hamsters who provide all the electricity are running themselves ragged on their wheels in an effort to get things moving again.
Update (12:05 PST): Phone Power's crippling outage has been traced to Los Angeles (of course). Four hours after losing service, they updated their Twitter stream (removing their original tweet) to place the blame on a rogue router. Still no word on when service might be restored.
At 7:45am PT a core router crashed in Los Angeles impacting inbound/outbound calls. Engineers are working to resolve the problem asap.
http://twitter.com/#!/PPowerNetStatus/status/197757138121146368
Update (1:52 PST): According to Phone Power's Tweetstream, power has been restored and your VoIP phone service should soon be back online. Let's give a big cheer to the hamsters, and maybe pass out some Gatorade.
Routing has been restored and Phone Power services are coming back online.
http://twitter.com/#!/PPowerNetStatus/status/197788244203667456
Update (3:04 PST): After nearly 8 hours without service, Phone Power customers should now be able to get on the horn and let mom know why they haven't been able to call her back. The Phone Power site is currently still down, but phone service has been restored (according to their Twitter account).
Phone service has been restored. The PhonePower website is still down at this time.
http://twitter.com/#!/PPowerNetStatus/status/197808129390555136
Actually, when you call mom to let her know you're not lying in a ditch somewhere, you ate a good breakfast, and you've got clean undies on, be sure to let her know that your phone service was down due to some serious Internet shenanigans (that's at least one step above tomfoolery, so this is significant).
In fact, Phone Power's CEO Ari Ramezani gave VoIPReview.org an exclusive as to what happened today:
We are still reviewing the data. From what we can tell, our website received a massive DOS attack today. At this point we have isolated our webservers from the actual phone service. Our website is still down but phone service has been restored.
Kudos to Phone Power for resolving this issue — which despite all the hamster jokes is really quite serious — speedily and with minimal inconvenience to Phone Power customers.