Archive for the ‘Status’ Category
Preparing for Bad Weather: Sandy and Simple Phone Company (Update x2)
Just because we’re in sunny California doesn’t mean we take serious weather lightly. Like most major storms, our engineers will monitor all major events to ensure our network and systems are best prepared for effects from these events. Should you loose power, internet, or service for a weather related reason; here are a few steps to ensure your prepared just like us, and not miss a single call.
Forward your calls
Should you loose service, forward your calls to a mobile or any other US number. Call forwarding can be controlled from any web-enabled device or computer at my.simplephoneco.com, and by calling us at 888.272.8070.
Expanded customer service
Our customer service team will expand our customer support hours past 4pm tonight, and Tuesday if needed. We plan to maintain phone support, chats, and emails until midnight eastern.
Network status
You can monitor our network status 24/7 online at my.simplephoneco.com. Our engineers will continually update that page should we experience any trouble the next few days. (As we always do.)
Update:
We have expanded customer support hours to help our customers:
Monday – Open 10a to Midnight Eastern
Tuesday – Open 9a to 9pm Eastern
Wednesday – Return to normal hours, 10a to 7p Eastern
Update 2:
Our New York data center in mid-town Manhattan is still online and operational as backup power continues to maintain 100% of our operations. Should we encounter any trouble, we will update our status page.
PSA: A Tough Weekend for the Internet
Hi! I am Chris with the Simple Phone Company.
As a tech evangelist, I thought I’d share some notes on a seemingly tough weekend for anyone who uses the World Wide Web. I am going to suspect the nightly news will find this difficult to explain, so I’ll give it shot.
If you had technology problems this weekend, you’re not alone. Amazon-owned AWS (Amazon Web Services) experienced an outage that caused literally 1% of all servers to go dark. You may not have heard of AWS, but it’s used to store and provide servers to the likes of nearly everyone. It’s outage, which began Friday night and continued into Saturday, forced Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, and others offline for several hours. Once the lights came back, is took most of Saturday morning to recover.
As if having 1% of the internet down for several hours wasn’t bad enough to rock the ship, Saturday night’s “leap second” put the rest of the web into a tail spin. In brief, the atomic clocks of the world needed to skip a second to get back in-sync with Earth’s rotation. The big deal here is that MANY servers and their application rely on time sync to function. (Without time, a computer can’t work… remember Y2K anyone?) Some servers needed reboots, some needed new code, others are still being worked on. The biggest effect that I could find, and is not yet reported much on in the Blogosphere, is telecommunications. Carriers around the world found their phone calls drop and calls not completing all over.
As Monday begins, things seem to be getting back to normal… but it stands to show just how reliant we are on the tech we don’t see as we are the tech we hold in our hands.
For extended reading, check out this great article by Wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/leap-second-bug-wreaks-havoc-with-java-linux/
Chris M.
Simple Phone Co.
(Photo credit: Flickr’s alexbrn)
ALERT: Special Holiday Hours
In observation of the Christmas holiday weekend, our teams will be working special hours.
Holiday Hours:
Special hours for Christmas weekend:
Call: Phone Support closed.
Chat: Available 24/7 Sat. and Sun.
Email: Available 24/7 Sat. and Sun.
As always, we have engineers available 24/7 to monitor our network and services, and well as support for our customers via email and chat.
Storm Update: No Known Network Issues (Updated)
As the east coast weather’s Hurricane Irene, our engineers and Help Team are continuing to monitor our network.
At this time, there are no issues to report.
For continued status updates, please check back here.
-Help Team
Update 730pm Sat EST: Many people are effected by the wide-spread power outages. For those without power, once your power is restored, your Landline Adapter or IP Phone should find our network automatically. If you have any trouble, please contact us.
Update 230am Sun EST: Still no issues to report. We have expanded our support hours throughout the weekend.
Update 5am Sun EST: No network or data center outages to report. We will continue to monitor the situation
Update 1145am Sun EST: No issues to report. While we understand the majority of the storm has lessoned or cleared, any customers who had power outages and are having issues with their service may contact our help team anytime.
Pardon our dust…
Pardon our dust, we’re busy making our services and network even better!
This weekend our team is working hard to upgrade and prepare our network for exciting new products and even better services.
To do so, we are disabling our online account system in order to upgrade on Friday (July 22) at 8pm PST to 3am Monday (July 24).
During this time you will not be able to pay your bill online, review invoices, update support tickets, or update your profile.
THERE WILL NOT BE ANY INTERRUPTION OF PHONE SERVICE.
Should you need any support during this downtime, or have any questions about this, please feel free to email our Help Team engineers 24/7 at help@simplephoneco.com or click “Chat” at simplephoneco.com.
Look for more details on all our exciting “newness” come Monday!
- Help Team
