Call Quality and Connection Issues

BellesLink has experienced call quality and connection issues due to a distributed denial of service, DDoS, attack on our communications provider. Service disruptions have affected a significant portion of web-based phone and text services across country.

We apologize for any inconvenience this disruption has caused your business. We are monitoring the situation through our provider and doing all we can to minimize its effects on the delivery of our service.

You may continue to experience intermittent disruptions until the situation is fully resolved.

9/30 Update

Incident Start: 9/25/2021 2:55 PM ET
Incident End: Ongoing

Effected services

  • Core Voice
  • API Voice
  • Core Messaging
  • API Messaging
  • EVS Number Provisioning
  • 911 Voice

At 2:55pm ET on September 25, our communications provider received alarms indicating the existence of a critical network-wide incident.

Their engineering resources were engaged and identified a very high volume DDoS attack was underway, affecting all their data centers and began troubleshooting and recovery efforts.

Due to the severity of the attack, their infrastructure and applications became impaired and customers would have experienced disruption across all services including Voice, Messaging, Number Provisioning, and 911.

Our provider implemented DDoS auto-mitigation across the network as the first step towards resolution.

Secondly, their teams blocked affected ports and implemented additional access control lists to mitigate the underlying condition.

Their engineering and application teams validated the successful recovery of all services and believed the incident had been fully resolved at approximately 6:35pm ET on September 25.

However, our provider was then targeted three additional times during the following windows:

  • September 26, 10:52am – 2:35pm ET
  • September 26, 5:39pm – 6:40pm ET
  • September 27 8:24am – ongoing

The signature of the attack changed on subsequent attacks on September 26th, but was less impactful given the work done the previous day.

However, the attacks on September 27 were across more targeted applications and our provider has had lesser success in mitigating the impact to customers.

Our customers may have observed either a full or partial impairment of the listed services during the recovery of the network.

Unfortunately, the DDoS threat remains but our provider is continuing to aggressively tackle the malicious activity and mitigate all network and service impacts to the greatest degree possible; both internally and with external partners, such as BellesLink.

Cause

On multiple occasions, our communication provider’s network has been the target of a DDoS attack which have resulted in the impairment of infrastructure and applications for customers.

Resolution

During the first DDoS attack, our provider implemented DDoS auto-mitigation across the network.

Their teams then blocked affected ports and implemented more specific access control lists to resolve the first incident.

However, given the subsequent attacks this incident is ongoing. Our provider is marshaling all resources to mitigate impacts to services due to these attacks.

9/28 Update

Intermittent Service Disruptions

Sep 28, 1:00 PM MT

BellesLink has experienced call quality and network connection issues due to a distributed denial of service, DDOS, attack on our communications network provider. Service disruptions have affected a significant portion of web-based phone and text services across country.

We apologize for any inconvenience this disruption has caused your business. We are monitoring the situation through our provider and doing all we can to minimize its effects on the delivery of our service.

You may continue to experience intermittent disruptions until the situation is fully resolved.