[computerex]

> I can't think of any other major company conducting a public postmortem for a customer service failure (as opposed to networking/ops failure).

There are many companies that have done this in the past. They are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, this is lip service for the fact that their mishap blew up in their faces on twitter. Do you really think they would have gone at length to highlight to the public this incident had it not gone viral?

> Not only are they changing their policies across the board, taking on more risk to improve customer experience, but they are hiring extra people so it does not happen again. Kudos for that!

There is no telling that they are actually going to follow through with anything. Mere lip service.

The bottom line is, people host their businesses and livelihoods on cloud providers and they (the cloud providers) should take the necessary care and precautions when taking destructive actions. Maybe err on the side of the customer instead of shutting down someone's entire business because of some automated heuristic. Maybe have a better response time than 29 hours. Maybe teach basic communication and develop processes so that care agents can see and react appropriately to recent activity on the account. These are not revolutionary concepts, they are simple things that demonstrate customer care, something DigitalOcean is sorely lacking.

[rajaganesh87]

> precautions when taking destructive actions.

No data was lost, it is not destructive in anyway.

> because of some automated heuristic.

If the customer had "payment history" none of this would have happened. Probably it was being used under "startup credits"

> people host their businesses and livelihoods on cloud providers

people shouldn't run entire operation on credits and blame DO in twitter.

Only issue is that DO took 29 hours, apart from that i see no problem with DO.

[icebraining]

> people shouldn't run entire operation on credits

Why not? Until now, I wouldn't have considered that using credits might make me a second-class customer. They should at least be upfront about that.

[dkersten]

> No data was lost, it is not destructive in anyway.

Except in the way that the guy may[1] have lost customers or revenue due to the downtime. Being offline, even without data loss, is very destructive for many businesses.

[1] I don't know anything about his business.

[computerex]

> No data was lost, it is not destructive in anyway.

Tell that to the owner who was begging DO for their data back on Twitter. Again, had this not blown up on twitter nothing would have been done.

> If the customer had "payment history" none of this would have happened. Probably it was being used under "startup credits"

What's your point in saying this?? The fact is that the customer faced downtime because of a bug in DO's code.

> people shouldn't run entire operation on credits and blame DO in twitter.

Are you saying that customers on credits aren't subject to SLA's?

> Only issue is that DO took 29 hours, apart from that i see no problem with DO.

I think you seem very biased.

[pbreit]

It should be pretty hard to shit down a legit biz. Seemed automatic in this case.

[gavindean90]

I mean it is. Unless your business is wholly dependent on a service from my business.

[pbreit]

Edit: shut

[scarejunba]

What? We use a few million dollars in GCP credits every month.

[_Codemonkeyism]

"There are many companies that have done this in the past."

Haven't seen those, can you point me to them? I love companies doing this.

[artificialLimbs]

There is also no telling if they're not going to follow through, and it is not mere lip service.

What cloud business do you run that does better, according to your standards?