Windstream voice outages mostly resolved; technology upgrade blamed

May 2, 2013 | By Sean Buckley

Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN) reported Wednesday evening that the majority of the network outages that left business customers across as many as 23 states without voice service have been fixed, though isolated issues remain.

The telco said on its support page that while "There may still be some isolated issues our team is working aggressively to remedy."

The outage was due to a technology upgrade on various parts of its long-distance network, the carrier said. It did not reveal the voice vendor that performed the upgrade.

"Unfortunately, after the new technology was subjected to mass volume, this newly upgraded system began performing erratically," Windstream said on its support site. "We have subsequently reverted to the prior configuration."
Reports of trouble on the network began to emerge on Monday, when the telco was already dealing with a Sunday afternoon switch failure that interrupted service to about 30,000 local business and residential lines in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and surrounding areas in South Florida.

Business users in other regions, from Georgia to Missouri, commented on FierceTelecom as well as on Windstream's Facebook page that they were seeing issues with their voice services, and that hold times for the carrier's customer support were at least an hour. Windstream confirmed that in addition to long-distance and toll-free voice services, the outage affected its ability to receive inbound calls to its support centers.