VOIP vendor suffers DDoS attack

Voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) provider, Ooma, has been hit with a power failure at its data centre provider and has had a simultaneous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on its Web site, reports ZDnet.

This has left customers unable to use Ooma's VOIP service for several hours or even check on the status of their accounts while Ooma rushed to recover from the problems.

According to Ooma, it was the sudden rush of customers that no longer had phone services, trying to access the corporate home page that caused what appeared to be a DDoS attack.

Like other incidents reported in the last week (Amazon Web Services and Microsoft suffered serious outages in Dublin), Ooma put its network outage down to a power failure in part of its data centre, according to Data Centre Dynamics.

The US-based VOIP provider explains: “Ooma's service was interrupted following a network outage due to an extremely rare power failure at a portion of our data centre which also affected several other companies.”

Ooma says it's working with its data centre provider to put provisions in place to ensure this does not happen again.

Gather says Ooma VOIP is a popular phone technology used as a business phone service. The service differs from other popular VOIP technologies in that customers pay for it upfront rather than having a contract or monthly subscription fees.