The Czar breaks it down.
So absolutely huge response to my article last night. But it turns out things were even worse for Phone Burner than I predicted.
While I anticipated Phone Burner would struggle in the wake of the FCC’s Public Notice, it turns out its entire platform was shut down for a lengthy period following the Order. Per its website:
On Tuesday afternoon, our company was made aware of a Public Notice posted by the FCC to all US-Based voice providers. As part of that notice, PhoneBurner was listed as one of the service providers for a company placing alleged illegal calls.
The notice was clear that calls originating from our platform, by the customer named in the Notice, were to be suspended within a prescribed timeline. We had no advance notice of this Public Notice and, to our knowledge, neither did our carrier partners.
As you have experienced, some of our carrier partners have interpreted the Public Notice to include all PhoneBurner traffic. In our opinion, this clearly was not the intent of the Public Notice by the FCC.
We are working aggressively to get our services restored, and there are a few material updates to provide you.
First, we have retained legal counsel that specializes in working with the FCC.
Second, our legal counsel had meetings this morning with the FCC on our behalf. We believe that the interpretation of that meeting was consistent with the Public Notice. Simply put: carriers were asked to remove one company’s traffic and not all PhoneBurner call traffic.
Third, our legal counsel, in partnership with the FCC and PhoneBurner, is identifying a series of modest and near-term steps that can be taken to help us reactivate our outbound dialing services. This is the most important step.
Fourth, to help appropriately set expectations, service could be restored in the next few hours to the next few days depending on some of the factors described above.
We will share more information regarding timing of service restoration with you as soon as we have it. Our teams are working around the clock on this, and service restoration is our top priority.
Thank you for your trust in PhoneBurner. Please know we are doing all that we can to reactivate our outbound dialing services.
Sincerely,
Team PhoneBurner
I’ve invited both the FCC and PhoneBurner to join the Deserve to Win podcast to discuss.
I should note that the latest update from Phone Burner says service has been restored as of 12:33 am pacific this morning- just a couple hours after my post last njght:
SERVICE RESTORATION (partial): As of 12:33 AM PT (Friday 1/27) we have resumed our outbound dialing service. We continue to work on SMS, Inbound (vPhone) and Number Purchasing. We’ll update status as we make progress.
So did the czar save Phone Burner? Maybe.
But this really underscores the impact of the FCCs rulings here. Let’s brainstorm ways to avoid this happening.