[joecot]

My coworker is running a hosted affiliate tracking system on AWS as part of our company. He regularly has to deal with AWS wanting to pull our servers because of email spam -- not because we're sending spam emails, but because some affiliate link is in a spam email that resolves to our server, and Spamhaus complained to AWS.

Usually this can get handled after a few days of aggravating emails back and forth, we get our client to ban the affiliate in question, and move on with our days with no downtime. But a few weeks ago my coworker came in to find our server taken offline, because AWS emailed him about a spam complaint on a Friday night, and they hadn't gotten a response by Sunday. It'd been down for hours before he realized.

They'd just null terminated the IP of the server, so he updated IPs in DNS real quick, but he then spent half a day both resolving the complaint, and then getting someone at AWS to say it wouldn't happen again. They supposedly put a flag on his account requiring upper management approval to disable something again, but we'll see if that works when it comes up again.