The term Downtime or sometimes even referred to as Outage is used to describe that our services are completely or partially unavailable. There could be several reasons that could cause this. We have classified a few and they are as follows:
Operator related Downtimes: These issues are related to our network operators or downstream providers. During this period, you can expect an interruption in incoming or outgoing calls, and sometimes both. Although we have no control over this, our team constantly follows up with the operators to ensure that the services are restored at the earliest.
Unplanned Downtimes: We come across these, when our network operators face issues like fibre cut or any other operator related concerns. These can occur at any point in time due to several reasons and are outside Exotels control. Also, Exotel might not have the exact ETA for these issues as the operator's team will be working on fixing them. RCA/RFO for these outages are dependent on the operators. We will share the RCA/RFO as soon as we get the details from the operator.
Planned maintenance: These are planned activities that the operators keep us informed about and inturn we keep our clients informed. This generally happens during off-peak hours, mostly during night hours when the call volumes are low and the impact is less on our customers.
Exotel Specific Downtimes: These are instances where something has stopped working internally at Exotel’s end. Example: The platform is unresponsive or some of the Exotel APIs are not functioning, as they are supposed to, etc.
Unplanned Downtimes: We come across these when either some internal service that is responsible for the job has either stopped working or the servers did not respond the way they are supposed to due to configuration issues. Normally we will have this fixed within 2 - 4 hours, however, in case of a major failure, which is rare, this might take longer. RCA for these downtimes will be shared by us within 72 hrs of the issue being resolved.
Planned maintenance: This is when we are either upgrading our Servers or Data centres. These would be planned in advance and we will keep our customers informed about the same. Also, they would be planned during off-peak hours when the impact on our customers will be minimal.
Troubleshooting Steps during Downtimes
If you have a customer-facing number displayed on your website, then you can divert the calls to a different region exophone number available in your account and resume your services without interruption.
For example:
If this exophone number: 080-XXX-XXX is affected due to downtime and you have this number as the customer-facing number 9432XXXXX displayed in your website then find a different region exophone that does not start with like 022-XXX-XXX then route the call to this exophone 022-XXX-XXX from your customer-facing number and assign the exophone number to your incoming call flow.
This step will not be helpful if you have displayed the exophone number 080-XXX-XXX directly on your website.
You can also subscribe to our Heartbeat API (beta) to keep you informed about exophone status. Heartbeat API notifies the ‘health’ of an Exophone in real-time based on which actions can be taken at your end.
If you have any questions or concerns, please connect with us using the chat widget on your Exotel Dashboard or Whatsapp us on 08088919888