[holoduke]

Welcome to the new world where tech companies rule. Where moral standards are gone. Where local laws do not apply. This shit is happening a lot. Artists on Youtube, App builders on Playstore/iOS. Marketing companies on Google search, pretty women on Instagram, political men on Facebook or Twitter. I feel for you. Hope it gets alright.

[macspoofing]

>Welcome to the new world where tech companies rule.

I understand what you're saying but, speaking specifically to this case (which is a little different than YouTube censorship), I think this highlights the dangers of outsourcing your critical infrastructure to third-party SAAS companies without a mitigation plan.

As companies, we have to get into the habit of putting together mitigations plans for times when the outsourced SAAS disruption has significant business impact. Here, Twilio blocked the account of this vendor, but Twilio could have gone bankrupt, or they themselves could have had a significant disruption and the end-result would have been the same. Was there a plan put in place for that? If Twilio isn't responsive with support, are any of their competitors better? Maybe it was a better idea to go with a smaller or more expensive competitor but one who gives you a dedicated account manager you can call anytime if something goes wrong. Twilio fucked up here, but ultimately the responsibility for business continuity rests with OP. They can't offload that responsibility on Twilio because if Twilio fucks up, Twilio doesn't suffer the consequences.

[manigandham]

The entire value of these companies is in the outsourcing of the entire problem.

It's incredibly hard to have multiple vendors if you're using specific or advanced functionality, and if you're hosting a failover yourself then you might as well just use that instead.

[macspoofing]

>It's incredibly hard to have multiple vendors if you're using specific or advanced functionality, and if you're hosting a failover yourself then you might as well just use that instead.

I'm not suggesting any specific solution and I didn't even suggest they run their own infrastructure. There are good reasons to outsource these kinds of operations. But what happened was the company got the rug pulled underneath their feet and realized they didn't know how to contact their critical supplier. That's not good and that's their failure in this mess.

I don't understand the resistance to identifying and mitigating business risks. Honestly.

[manigandham]

You're not understanding because there is no resistance. This was the risk.

[macspoofing]

Again, let's say Twilio is the only supplier that could have provided this service for them, they still need to understand what risks that entails and how to mitigate them.

What happened in this situation is that Twilio for one reason or another decided to block access to their service, ostensibly halting their business. OK. That's not good. You know what made it worse? The CEO realizing that they don't have any line of communication to Twilio and that Twilio had shit tech support and therefore he had to frantically trawl Twitter and HN and Reddit and emailing Jeff Lawson (Twilio) CEO. Are you telling me they couldn't prevent this? You sure there isn't an Account Manager assigned to their account? Twilio holds conferences, there are plenty of opportunities to forge some relationship with someone at Twilio so you could at least backchannel issues like this (in fact, some Twilio dev here at HN noticed this and escalated it). By the way, Twilio is not the only telephony provider. If Twilio has shit support, OP can find another critical supplier, maybe a smaller or a more expensive vendor that is more responsive.

How about this: I looked through OPs comment history and he mentioned that their support numbers is provided by their service (i.e. they dogfood their product). Is that not a risk? If they are down, or Twilio is down, their customers can't reach a human either.

Very few of us control our circumstances, but we can certainly control our response to them. Outsourcing isn't the problem here. It has benefits and detriments. Lack of planning, and foresight is the issue here. This could have been a 10 minute outage, instead of a full day outage.

[blowski]

Remove the tech-specific words from your comment, and you would probably find people saying the same thing throughout all of history.

[dx034]

Not sure if large car companies or clothes manufacturers (just two examples of large companies) were ever able to ignore legal rights of their customers. This has only become possible with digital services where companies refuse to acknowledge local laws and regulation.

[halfdan]

Car companies selling cars exceeding allowed emission levels and clothes manufacturers exploiting child labour in third world countries?

Sure there were "fines" but as usual that was pocket change them..

[varispeed]

Cost of doing business factored in the product price...

[blowski]

For most of history, customers didn't have the kind of legal rights they have now. Businesses could refuse to serve you, warranties were non-existent until late 1800s. And even when consumers did get rights, there have been constant stories in newspapers of "big companies trampling on the rights of consumers".

[gumby]

> Not sure if large car companies or clothes manufacturers (just two examples of large companies) were ever able to ignore legal rights of their customers.

Ha, check out “unsafe at any speed” the book that launched Ralph Nader and the government’s role in consumer safety.

Or “The Jungle”, the book that launched food safety regulations (and some worker safety) a century ago.

Certain politicians and certain companies decry “regulation” generically but there are good reasons behind almost all of it.

[kube-system]

If you want an example of ignoring local law, how about the East India Company? They formed their own army, took over part of India, and set up their own government.

[blowski]

Exactly. If "putting innocent people in chains and enslaving them in a foreign country" doesn't count as ignoring people's legal rights, I'm not sure what does.

[pjc50]

> clothes manufacturers (just two examples of large companies) were ever able to ignore legal rights of their customers

Clothes manufacturers have been notorious for mistreating their employees, though; e.g. Triangle Shirtwaist.

[akudha]

That might be true, but nobody in history had as much power/reach as these tech companies.

[blowski]

The East India Trading Company. Rockefeller.

[TakuYam]

Genghis Khan, Alexander of Macedonia

[dx034]

It's really frustrating. I've been trying for months to get access to a suspended twitter account that was suspended without informing me or giving a reason. The tickets get ignored and their support doesn't respond on Twitter. They also ignore GDPR (which would give me the right to have my data deleted). I have no idea what to do. The account isn't important but it shows up prominently on Google as a suspended account which isn't great.

Any small company ignoring privacy laws would get into trouble. If you're as big as Twitter or Facebook you can just ignore laws and get away with it..

[sofixa]

> They also ignore GDPR (which would give me the right to have my data deleted

Report them to your local ICO.

[Throwawayaerlei]

"What these corporations are doing is literally destroying the basis for a developed economy....

"In countries with strong rule of law:

"1. Property rights over land, equipment, and personal items are clear and protected by law.

"2. Contracts between people, businesses, and the government are effectively enforced by the legal system.

"3. Political accountability is high and corruption is low.

"4. Business regulations are clear and enforced in a transparent manner.

"In such environments people make long-term investments and build large organizations. In contrast, if the property rights and contracts are not enforced and the business regulations are not clear, most of the economy consists of small family owned firms with little modern equipment. A high-tech, prosperous economy would not develop.

"Effectively, there are no contracts anymore in the digital economy. There is no predictability anymore. There is no accountability. There is no responsibility. There are no requirements for performance anymore. In sum, the US digital economy is rapidly becoming the equivalent of a third-world economy, complete with crony capitalism and digital robber barons."