Increased Resilience through Fallback Numbers

Because we know how much you rely on us!

Published on September 25th, 2022

Early this month, FreshBuzzer had two brief service interruptions which caused some buzzer calls to be dropped. This is unacceptable for us and we know we can do better.

However, outages happen from three AWS outages in a month taking down major services such as Slack and Epic Games to the recent Rogers outage leaving a quarter of the Canadian population, about 10 million people, without any internet or cell phone service for 19 hours!

So when you can't prevent outages and disruptions it is even more important to prepare for them. Fallback Numbers are our first step to provide more reliable service to you.

We encourage all users to configure their fallback number on their account page. Here is what that looks like: Choose your personal BuzzMeIn number - search by city or area code Choose your personal BuzzMeIn number - search by city or area code

This number is automatically saved to a completely separate system that will take over answering buzzer calls in case of any issues with freshbuzzer.com. For maximum reliability, this fallback system does not have all of the advanced features that FreshBuzzer provides - it simply forwards your incoming buzzer call directly to your Fallback Number. This is exactly what your buzzer does without FreshBuzzer, so not too bad for a possible "outage".

Of course Secure Access Codes are one of the favorite features of our users and we will evaluate if a Fallback Access Code might be an option in the future.

Besides preparing for service disruptions - necessary but still far from ideal - we will be taking further steps to avoid them. Stay tuned for more news soon in this regard.

Cheers,
Axel