VoicePulse goes down (NYC Data Center)

[Michael McNamara]

I was very surprised this morning when I checked my personal email only to find an email message from the VoicePulse voice mail system. It seems that someone had tried to contact me at my VoicePulse number and the message had gone to their voice mail system (even though I have their voice mail system disabled). I initially thought about blaming it on the wife, she probably unplugged the phone at home or maybe even the TA, but eventually I thought that was unlikely.

After some digging on the net and making some test calls I realized that VoicePulse was down, and my home phone wasn't ringing at all.

This is the first time I've ever had an issue with VoicePulse... it was funny that I didn't even consider the possibility that it was VoicePulse until I had exhausted the other avenues.

Anyone else using VoicePulse?

Cheers!

References;
http://twitter.com/voicepulse
http://www2.dslreports.com/forum/r24545366-VoicePulse-VP-Down

[Michael McNamara]

I received the following email message from VoicePulse;


Dear Michael,

The recent outage affecting VoicePulse residential customers was due to maintenance work being done by the power company at one of the datacenters we use. During the course of this maintenance work, the power company caused a power failure by inadvertently damaging the UPS system. VoicePulse was one of many companies affected by the outage. Unfortunately, the power failure occurred while numerous critical system operations were under way, rendering some of our systems unusable. While there are backups of these systems, a significant amount of work would be required to get them restored.

Prior to this outage, VoicePulse was preparing to move customers to a brand new retail platform. Work has been under way for months on a platform which will allow us to begin introducing new features while reducing call quality issues. In addition, the new platform can easily be deployed throughout all of our datacenters, greatly reducing the effects of future outages. Our business & wholesale service already runs on a similar platform and has been able to successfully handle calls uninterrupted through similar outages. After weighing the amount of work necessary to restore the old system versus the work required to move customers to the new platform, we decided to proceed with migrating our customers to the new platform immediately. The decision was easier to make considering our customers would end up on a more reliable and functional platform, instead of being restored to an aging system susceptible to future problems.

We realize this outage is an inconvenience to our loyal customers and we appreciate your patience while we restore service. We would like to assure you that once your service is fully restored, it will be on a new platform that has been designed to greatly minimize the risk of downtime in the future. In addition, the new platform will support many of the features you have requested but we were unable to add to the old system.

While our engineers work to finish the migration, we ask that you report any issues you may be experiencing so we can immediately address them. All customers should have basic inbound and outbound calling, inbound and outbound CallerID, and voicemail working already. If you do not, please send an email to contact@voicepulse.com describing the issue so we can investigate and correct it as soon as possible. We know many of our customers take advantage of our call filtering and blocking -- they will be working again soon. Some features will even have new and improved functionality like schedules and advanced wildcard matching!

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience caused by this rare and unexpected outage. We are confident that the benefits of the new retail service will far outweigh the inconvenience and the new features will greatly exceed your expectations.

Regards,

VoicePulse