Phone Power: FBI Investigating Cyber Attack That Caused Outage

According to Phone Power, yesterday’s day long outage was caused by a massive cyber attack.

In an e-mail exchange with Consumer Press, a source at Phone Power told us that their network was attacked by an unknown source. He wrote that the data they have collected about the attack has been turned over to the FBI, and it is already under investigation by the agency. He declined to detail the nature of the attack.

Phone Power provides Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) phone service to both residential and commercial customers. It is a privately owned company that was founded in 2005. The phone service is sold through their website and at Best Buy stores.

The outage began at approximately 10:30 AM Eastern time yesterday (May 2). Phone Power announced via Twitter that the phone service was restored at approximately 5 PM. For several hours afterwards, some users continued to report that their service was still not working.

For a complete timeline, see our live updates during the outage here.

According to our contact, Phone Power does provide service credits to customers. He did not say if that applies to residential as well as commercial customers, but said questions concerning credits could be e-mailed to billing@phonepower.com.

He also said that Phone Power wanted customers to share their experiences of the outage with them. The stories and complaints will be used to raise the issue with the FBI.

He asked that complaints and stories be sent to cyberattack@phonepower.com. He also confirmed that Phone Power’s engineers are taking steps to prevent attacks like this in the future.

–update, May 3, 10am (ET)–

Phone Power’s website remains unavailable. The actual VOIP phone service is working from our test location.

–update, May 3, 11:15am (ET)–

Phone Power’s website now up and running.