Vonage Holdings Corp. has confirmed that it experienced a widespread service outage that dropped about half its calls for an hour on Friday.

"We were having sporadic network-related issues that lasted for about an hour, affecting about 50 percent of our inbound and outbound calling," says Brooke Schultz, Vonage's VP of corporate communications.

Schultz says the outage started sometime between 2:30 p.m. and 2:45 p.m. EST and lasted about an hour.

Earlier, lines at Vonage headquarters itself were difficult to get through, with repeated busy signals and bad connnections. At the time of this writing, the company's corporate Website was down as well.

One user told Light Reading that the service is out. And several posts on the Broadband Reports message board confirm that the consumer VOIP company's service was out in several area codes.

For some users, this isn't the first outage this week, but it is the only network-wide problem reported. "What bothers me is the lack of information. We never found out what happened yesterday and here it happens again," writes one poster on Broadband Reports.

The catch with Vonage is that the company does not own its own network, so it's at the mercy of the carriers it relies on for connections, and, when something goes wrong, there's a limit to what it can do (see Vonage Spreads the Blame).The outage comes just a day after Vonage was handed a major victory against a rural carrier that was blocking its calls (see FCC Fines VOIP Villains).

— Phil Harvey, News Editor, Light Reading