Oct 06, 2016
On Tuesday, a series of network issues from Level 3 Communications caused widespread outages for every major phone carrier on the East Coast. DailyDot and NetworkWorld reported phone providers including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile were affected while others such as Google, Amazon, Netflix and Comcast also experienced issues. While half of the country was impacted by this outage, we are pleased to announce etherFAX remained fully operational during this time.
Understanding the business-critical needs of our customers, we have built our network and data center operations with multiple layers of redundancy to ensure reliability, performance and uptime. It is communications outages like this that make you understand how important your network provider really is.
Put simply, etherFAX was prepared.
Before the outage was reported, our engineers re-routed traffic to alternative carriers. We took action 18 minutes before Level 3 first reported the problem at 11:00 AM (see timeline below.) etherFAX’s multiple carrier backbone infrastructure leverages tier 1 and tier 2 providers. This not only ensures network redundancy but also offers high-availability and the flexibility to offload traffic to other networks.
“We are proud to say that while most of the US experienced outages yesterday, etherFAX’s network operated without issue,” explained Scott Ashouri, Vice President of Sales at Exucom Systems, Inc. “Their infrastructure and staff understand the need for business continuity and most importantly kept our SENCore customers in the loop throughout the day.”
As part of etherFAX’s standard operating procedures, we offer a series of tools and notifications to keep customers informed during situations like this. For example, yesterday we provided customers with real-time, chronological updates on system status and performance through our website. Here is a screenshot of what we reported yesterday:
Additionally, customers utilizing the etherFAX Secure Exchange Network (SEN) of servers were not impacted. In fact, all transport between endpoints on SEN were delivered flawlessly.
etherFAX SEN is the world’s largest ecosystem, leveraging military-grade encryption and hybrid cloud technology to provide secure communications. Network fax servers are the answer to 100% secure document delivery. With etherFAX SEN, documents never travel to an external telephone network and are securely routed solely within the etherFAX network.
With Hurricane Matthew on its way, other outages may be on the horizon throughout the East Coast. Will you be prepared?