RingCentral Goes Down, Raising Questions About its Stability - Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO), AT&T (NYSE:T)

Is the cloud-based phone service worth the trouble of enduring one major outage a year?

Benzinga uses RingCentral. In 2011, on our company's

, the service went down, effectively terminating our ability to make or receive calls with our office phones. It was awful, to say the least. RingCentral assured us that the problem would not happen again. But here we are, and once again the service is down. When I was first alerted to the problem, the company's

support page

showed the "no known issues" system status image you see above. Now that image has been changed to an orange alert with a "more info" link, along with the following message:

"The RingCentral network is currently experiencing issues impacting our Digital Line services. Some users may not be able to make or receive calls using there Digital Phone service. No other services are affected at this time. The RingCentral team is aware of the issues and is actively working to fix the problem. We will continue to update this website with additional information. We apologize for any service interruption to your business."

With a $10 million investment from Cisco

CSCO

and the

possibility of an IPO

, you would think that RingCentral would work hard to prove that it is just as reliable as a standard phone service from AT&T

Follow me @LouisBedigianBZ

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