Posted on: Saturday, March 5, 2005

Net phone firm suffers outage

Associated Press

NEW YORK — Vonage, the leading Internet-based telephone service, suffered an outage yesterday that left about half of its 500,000 subscribers without service for about 45 minutes.

The outage was caused by a glitch with a software upgrade Thursday night, said Brooke Schulz, a spokeswoman for Vonage Holdings Corp.

The problem struck at about 9:45 Hawai'i time, and Vonage stabilized the network with a software patch by 10:30 Hawai'i time.

"This was the first issue we've ever had related to software," Schulz said, adding that changes have now been implemented to prevent another disruption.

Vonage was the first company to successfully deploy phone service using the technology known as VoIP, for voice over Internet protocol, on a wide scale.