Ooma's service provider denies a role in outage

During yesterday afternoon's complete service outage at private VoIP service provider Ooma, along with the simultaneous hold-up of e-mail delivery for some BlackBerry customers, the provider's chief marketing officer, Rich Buchanan, told both customers and reporters through his Twitter feed that Internap, a data co-location services provider, was to blame. But in a statement to Betanews this afternoon, an Internap spokesperson denied any kind of service problem on its side of the network.

The spokesperson told Betanews, "There was a ticket opened with Ooma at Internap regarding this issue...Our NOC personnel determined that there was nothing happening within our network and that it probably was a problem after the hand-off was made from Internap to the Ooma network itself. The Ooma personnel are still investigating...The packet loss they were experiencing during the approximate 90 minutes they were having issues, likely caused dropped calls to their customers (as VoIP is very sensitive to packet loss)."

UPDATE Late this afternoon, Internap's spokesperson added that Ooma's personnel are stating the matter is still under investigation, and that they're not ready to state the incident entirely happened on its side of the network.

At one point via Twitter yesterday, after the service outage had largely subsided, San Francisco Business Times reporter Patrick Hoge questioned Ooma's Buchanan, "Are Ooma's issues linked to more widespread Internet problems in the Valley today?" Buchanan responded, "Ooma issues were linked to an outage at Internap. It also affected RIM, Google, Yahoo, Blue Cross, [T-Mobile], Verizon, and others."

But Internap's spokesperson denied that any service ticket was opened with any other customer yesterday besides Ooma.

Another Twitter user suggested to Buchanan, "Can I suggest some redundancy on voicemail at least, so if this happens at least vmail gets through?" His response: "You certainly can. Failures like this expose the corner cases and we sure found one today."