Bandwidth is experiencing a major outage | Hacker News Reader

Bandwidth is experiencing a major outage

status.bandwidth.com

34 pointsgoshx19 comments

I’m not familiar with the company ’bandwidth’ but do find it a little funny they’re experiencing an outage.

But then I feel guilty seeing they have a 911 call service which is offline. This is really serious - I wonder what kind of tech they rely on for this, in order to even provide this service for people to rely on shouldn’t it match what major telcos need to use (in terms of resilience)?

Bandwidth is the underlying carrier or tandem provider (path that a call routes down) for a portion of nearly all VOIP carrier's traffic. Google Voice & Microsoft Teams Voice & Conferencing entirely rely on Bandwidth.com for calling & texting.

In many ratecenters, your only choices are buying tandem transport for incoming calls from Onvoy, Bandwidth.com, Peerless Networks, West/Intrado/Flowroute or establishing your own physical presence to switch calls and paying the incumbent telco for connectivity.

Great explanation thank you!

Just like with IP traffic, companies terminate calls through multiple providers. While bandwidth might be the primary termination provider for 911 for a company, the calls can be routed through others. That backup route, however, may not have locale information so the call might have to be taken initially at a national call center so the locale can be determined, after which it is properly forwarded to the local 911 center. Not ideal since it can add precious time to getting help, but at least the call can get through.

A large Canadian VOIP provider has been under a serious DDoS attack for the past week [0], I wonder if the group responsible is branching out.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/canadian-voip-provid...

Their main site is loading without CSS, it seems, and everything's laid out horribly (full screen search icon to kick things off), but that cookie consent popup still loads and looks fine.

Gotta make sure we can be served those sweet cookies!!

Is this related to the ongoing Extortion DDoS against voip.ms ?

Curious why this is flagged?

I'd like to know as well. The issues are still happening today.

I wish dang or someone from the team could chime in.

Seeing reports that the issue has been resolved, but not reflected on their status page just yet.

I just got a 502 Bad Gateway trying to look at their homepage to find out what it is they do.

Phone services for other carriers and companies, like DIDs (phone numbers), SIP trunks, SMS, and 911.

RingCentral, Nextiva, Microsoft Teams Voice (fully dependent on Bandwidth.com), Google Voice, Vonage (for a subset of numbers), and most wholesalers have some or all phone numbers on Bandwidth.com

Bandwidth is a major wholesaling VoIP provider. If you're using a VoIP or other non-traditional phone service provider that isn't big enough to directly interconnect with incumbent carriers, they likely work with Bandwidth (and possibly others).

Even big enough ones, like RingCentral.

RCLEC (RingCentral's CLEC) does not seem to host the majority of RingCentral's numbers despite being fully capable of doing so, RingCentral seem to sprinkle their numbers across Onvoy & Bandwidth.com if memory serves.

Makes for some really fun port out requests, when a client with 6 numbers has those numbers sprinkled across 3 or 4 different underlying telecoms despite RingCentral generating one unified bill for their service.

That must be why 99% of the SMS spam I receive comes back to Bandwidth as the carrier. On the bright side, I haven't gotten any spam in the last hour or so.

Why is this flagged?

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