Update: January 24th, 2025:
RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis yesterday evening issued an apology for the outage, saying on the company’s blog:
“We apologise to customers and partners impacted by yesterday’s intermittent service interruption.”
He continued by saying that RingCentral’s service has been fully restored.
“We have confirmed that no security breaches or data leaks occurred. Yesterday’s outage occurred because of an internal system error. We are taking further steps to ensure this does not happen again. We are committed to full transparency and we will make every effort to communicate a complete root cause analysis to impacted customers.”
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Cloud-calling giant RingCentral reportedly went down yesterday, taking its inbound and outbound calling service offline for numerous customers around the world.
A post from yesterday afternoon on the RingCentral subreddit titled “RingCentral Outage? Support Down?” received hundreds of comments from Redditors explaining their situation.
A user by the name of ArizonaSnake explained: “Same issue for us and our call center. Outbound calling issues are being reported on their services status page.” A screenshot was attached to the post showing RingCentral’s support page detailing various reported issues.
Another user, Davesreadings highlighted the scope of the issue: “The fact that their chat and ability to submit a ticket is also down is quite concerning.”
Indeed a local US news show KVUE reported that the issue took offline a number of phone services for clinics in Texas. Local news website South Pasadenan reported it took down the phone system of the Californian town’s city hall.
“South Pasadena City Hall’s phone system has been offline since approximately 10:00 AM this morning, as part of a nationwide outage affecting RingCentral services,” the publisher reported.
Although some services are appearing to come back online this afternoon for some users, issues are still effecting customers around the globe – with RingCentral reporting a host of calling issues in the Americas, APAC and EMEA.
Customers can continue to check for updates on the RingCentral status page – RingCentral Status
Examining the Outage
Although the issues are reported to have abated somewhat for some customers, there is still some mystery surrounding what caused the issue to keep RingCentral’s systems down.
“We are experiencing an outage that is causing some inbound and outbound calls to fail,”
RingCentral said in a blog.
“Getting your service restored is our #1 priority at this time. Our engineers are working hard to identify the root cause and resolve the situation. We will share a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) once service is fully operational.”
From there, updates on the situation from RingCentral were issued sporadically throughout the day.
- 10:52 PST: Initial investigation began.
- 11:42 PST: Mitigation steps were reportedly underway.
- 13:21 PST: Troubleshooting continued with updates promised hourly.
- 13:43 EST: RingCentral Operations teams are investigating the issue and will provide updates as they become available.
- 13:52 EST: RingCentral Operations teams are investigating the issue and will provide updates as they become available.
- 14:42 EST: RingCentral Operations teams are performing mitigation steps for this issue and will provide the next update in 1 hour, or when a significant change in status occurs.
- 15:38 EST: RingCentral Operations teams are continuing to perform troubleshooting for this issue and will provide the next update in 1 hour, or when a significant change in status occurs.
The incident appears to have also impacted strategic partners and resellers of the RingCentral platform.
“very concerned about this …….being an Avaya partner reseller…”
One Avaya Cloud Office (ACO) partners wrote on LinkedIn,
“major Avaya Cloud Office powered by RingCentral outages here in north America today Jan 22 2025 since 1:30 pm eastern time! it is now 3:45pm still no resolution what happened to 99.999 up time? or backup servers?”7
Avaya Cloud Office confirmed the outage on its service status page.
Should the Situation Make You Question Your Strategy?
I am sure you don’t need me to explain again how such downtime can be disastrous for your business, especially for a CCaaS like in the above context.
Yet one thing that may need explaining is the need to put a strategy in place to ensure your business is secured should the eventuality happen.
Cyber security company NetScout’s survey showed major UCaaS-related outages were experienced by 97 percent of enterprises in 2023.
Equally, 64 percent of respondents estimated associated losses of at least $10,000 in sales and productivity, and nearly half of enterprises with annual revenue over $10bn estimated losses of $100,000 to $1m or more.
Business Continuity: Steps to Implement
Business Continuity (or disaster recovery) strategies are often multi-layered and can be specific to each company situation.
Yet they share core things in common, which essentially boil down to having a backup operation to fall on.
RingCentral recommend five critical elements to ensure business continuity.
First, establish a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) tailored to your specific business needs, which determine how quickly systems must be restored and how much data can be potentially lost during an incident.
Create a comprehensive communication plan that assigns clear roles and responsibilities, ensuring every team member understands their part during an emergency.
Implement robust backup systems following the “3-2-1” data backup rule: maintain three data copies, store two on separate media, and keep one copy off-site, preferably using cloud-based storage.
Companies should also take a comprehensive inventory of their assets, categorizing them by criticality to business operations.
Perform regular testing to validate the plan’s effectiveness, conducting various drills such as walkthrough tests, team scenario exercises, restoration tests, and potentially full emergency simulations.
Lastly, invest in communication and cybersecurity platforms that facilitate remote work and data protection.
Additionally, depending on what industry you operate in, companies can utilise company mobiles to set up call forwarding to route incoming calls to mobile phones or alternative numbers in case of system failure.
Equally, for an even higher added level of assurance, investing in a multi-vendor strategy could be the right way for you.
Already, a report by Metrigy found around 18 percent of companies are using at least two primary calling platforms, while over 38 percent use multiple meeting apps and collaboration tools.
Disasters happen, but ensuring you have a good strategy can ensure that unnecessary downtime doesn’t have to follow.
