COVID-19 update: March 16, 2020

As the world’s response to events surrounding COVID-19 continues to evolve, your Bandwidth team is actively monitoring and adapting in real-time. We’ve been adjusting our contingency plans in recent weeks, and have a team of leaders meeting multiple times a day to review network status and make adjustments as needed. 

Throughout the days and weeks ahead, customers like you will play a pivotal role in the worldwide COVID-19 response. Healthcare workers, emergency responders, education systems, business enterprises, government entities, and social institutions will increasingly rely on our software platforms to supply robust conferencing, messaging, and voice calling to connect people and drive our economy forward while still honoring the need to distance ourselves physically.

This will likely be a time of unprecedented demand for all communications companies. Providers worldwide have observed a significant surge in data, voice, and messaging usage as more of the US and the world move toward work-from-home strategies to mitigate the spread of the disease. 

Some key points to remember:

• Our platform is geographically redundant, diverse, and highly available.
• Our team operates to the ISO 22301 standard – all identified critical business functions have proven business continuity plans that are annually reviewed, exercised, and tested.
• We have remote working capabilities for employees in all regions.
• Our team is working closely with our vendor partners and other carriers to manage any potential impact and will be able to adjust should the need arise.

We've prepared our platform to handle increased capacity, and we continue to actively coordinate with our industry partners to ensure the overall communications ecosystem is doing the same. As a result of these efforts and despite significant increases in traffic last week, our network, our team, and the broader communications ecosystem responded well and no impacts were observed or reported. All systems were operating normally.

While we're confident in our platforms’ capacity to handle the demand, it’s important to remember that voice calls usually traverse multiple carrier and data networks. If a call originates, terminates, or traverses a carrier who is experiencing issues, it could impact the call. 

We recommend that you consider the following:

• You may consider notifying your customers in the same spirit as we’ve taken here: networks worldwide are seeing unprecedented increases in traffic, and with that increase comes a risk of network congestion. Although your network and Bandwidth’s platform may be fully functional, there are external dependencies that can impact performance.
• Toll Free calls enter our network through different call paths than do Local DID calls. Users experiencing issues with calling in to a conference bridge via a Local DID may consider calling in via the Toll Free number as an alternative.
• Favoring VoIP over cellular networks may circumvent bottlenecks in mobile provider networks. Reminding customers of this option provides another potential call path.

We'll continue to monitor the situation closely, adapt to changing conditions, and keep you informed as our response evolves. Thank you for trusting us to serve you and your customers!  

Questions? 

Please open a ticket with your Bandwidth Support Team or hit us up at (855) 864-7776!