Palo Alto based VoIP provider Ooma experienced a double whammy yesterday.
Customer services were interrupted by a power failure at the company's data center while their corporate website was simultaneously experiencing excessive traffic levels that was initially reported to have been caused by a denial of service (DoS) attack.
Ooma released the following announcement yesterday via their corporate blog:
Ooma has restored its free home phone service, following a network outage of unknown origins.
Ooma service was interrupted around 5:40 a.m. Pacific time today and our company’s corporate website was shut down by a “Denial of Service” 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.
Meanwhile, our customer support team is available to help with any isolated service issues that may persist. We regret any inconvenience to our customers and will share additional information as it becomes available.
Initially it was not known whether the two events are connected, but a subsequent update to the company's blog indicates that the corporate website's downtime was probably caused by excessive traffic levels in response to the interruption of client services.
The update reads in part:
The service interruption occurred around 5:40 a.m. PT today and was restored approximately three hours later. The service interruption caused excessive traffic to the Ooma corporate site causing a brief denial of service. Our customer support team is available to help with any isolated service issues that may persist. We sincerely regret any inconvenience this has caused our customers.
The company states that the disruption of services was an extremely rare event, and that steps are being taken to assure that similar disruptions do not occur in the future.
