Data center power outage, DDoS attack double whammy cripples VoIP provider's network

As reported by Datacenter Dynamics and mirrored elsewhere on the cabling industry Web, the VoIP service provider Ooma (www.ooma.com) this week experienced a major network outage, due to a power outage in part of its data center. The US-based service reportedly lost connectivity for close to 3 hours, scuttling all inbound and outbound calls.

Further, as a blog post on the VoIP provider's website explains, "Ooma service was interrupted around 5:40 a.m. Pacific time today [Wed. Aug. 17] and our company’s corporate website was shut down by a DDoS attack minutes later, making it impossible to use the site to communicate with customers. The phone network and corporate site operate independently, but Ooma engineers are trying to determine if the shutdowns were somehow related."

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As noted by the Datacenter Dynamics reporting, this is not the first time the VoIP provider has encountered service difficulties. In 2009 Ooma's network went down for 6 hours after a fiber optic cable serving one of the data centers housing servers was physically cut. Another network outage occured in 2010.

The story prompted ZDnet next-gen data center blogger David Chernicoff to ask the question: How many times do such failures of "the cloud" have to happen before consumers take notice?

Link:Power outage brings US VoIP provider Ooma's services down (datacenterdynamics.com)