[work_for_x]

I work for Twilio and forwarded it internally. If you are 6 years with the company, you probably have an AE assigned to your company or have been in touch with any other human being along the way?

UPDATE: Your account should be active now.

[_ikfm]

Yes, it's active now after almost 7 hours. Thank you!

I plan to update everyone on what happened as soon as I get some sleep first. I've been up since 7 am and it's 2 am now. The incident started at 7 pm.

[gscott]

and setup another system to back this one up immediately because whatever algorithm brought down your account will do so again! If you spread the load across two platforms it would be a lot of work but you would be half-alive instead all-dead.

[e40]

We're still interested in an update!

[jariel]

Try to find an alternative service supplier at very minimum for back up and consider legal recourse.

[morrbo]

It's a bit shit that they had to jump through so many hoops, with HN being the only one that actually worked (after 7 hours) in order to get in touch. Serious kudos to you for helping them but I know a lot of people who wouldn't touch your company with a bargepole for these kind of reasons. Having to kick up a fuss on social media in order to get service, how very 2021..

[gtsop]

> Having to kick up a fuss on social media in order to get service, how very 2021..

Exactly. I'm locked out of a google account I have which links to a yt channel and a twitter account. The only truly viable option for me to get these back is work my way up the social media infulencing ladder and then complain how I lost access to my accounts. This is insane.

[vodkapump]

I had a similar issue as you, what ended up working for me was to contact the support for payment issues, and saying I had issues with paying for something.

Got in contact with a real human (i think..) in chat in under a minute, which helped me get it resolved via filling out like 4 different forms.

No idea if this would work for you though, but worth a try?

[sshagent]

I've had to use this kinda method for other things. No way to get a hold of a real person for support, try their new customer contact details. you can get they answer those real quick!

[ZephyrBlu]

Google is a different beast entirely. Complaining on social media doesn't generally work.

[capableweb]

Not really true. If you manage to get a "Google locked me out for no reason" post to hover on the frontpage of HN for a couple of hours, you most likely will get help from some Google insider. There are been plenty of such posts on HN where the issue has been resolved by what I assume to be HN-googlers.

[ZephyrBlu]

It is true. I've seen multiple posts where Googlers or ex-Googlers with contacts can't get access to a locked Google account.

[fatnoah]

I had an issue with a propane company contractor failing to secure permits before installing a line, which caused an expensive backyard project to grind to a halt, while still incurring cost. Every call to support was met with very friendly folks who promised a call back same day.

That never, ever happened and I had to resort to a nicely worded note to a corporate VP on LinkedIn to resolve it. Even then, I'm pretty sure that "unpermitted gas line work" was the real driver in getting it resolved, since that's a big deal.

[anonporridge]

It makes sense.

If the problem really gets kicked up in the media and left unaddressed, then eventually politicians will be forced to add some real regulation to force companies to do right by their customers.

That'd be expensive. So instead, ignore customers who can't kick up social attention and quickly resolve those that can before it gets legs. No one cares about the unknown, disconnected hordes of betrayed customers who lost their access for unknown reasons.

And I'm sure no company is covertly doing this to their tiny, would be competitors, killing the baby in the crib so to speak.

In fact, if you're an employee that actually cares about your customers, you'd do well to not internally raise these issues. Let the PR hit the executives harder and make them squirm.

[probably_wrong]

> Having to kick up a fuss on social media in order to get service, how very 2021..

I'm kinda sad that the thread is about Twilio and not Google - my GMail account is blocked and I was hoping I could jump on the bandwagon.

Someone here should make a startup out of it.

[duiker101]

Every so often a thread identical to this one appears for Google. The bottom line is always the same, don't use Google for anything that matters.

[gtsop]

This is good advice, but i need to wrap up the things I had set up on my accounts and then close the accounts. I need access to do that

[cute_boi]

same. I had a issue with google payment. It was around $5. Emailed them 100 times even phoned them for hours. They didn't solved the issue .

After I shamed them in twitter/github the issue got solved in 1 day.

The world is has become too wild tbh.

[hnarn]

Please bring this up with someone that cares in your company: you ABSOLUTELY NEED a well working support organization with EFFICIENT escalation procedures.

Support cannot be an afterthought. If a long time customer has a critical incident like this, it needs to be caught and forwarded to the relevant people within a few hours at most. This type of PR fallout is unacceptable and completely avoidable. I, for one, will avoid Twilio just based on this story alone.

[king_magic]

This thread is making my company seriously reconsider using Twilio. Please make sure Twilio’s leadership is aware of how damaging these kinds of situations are to your customers, and how much other customers pay attention to this kind of customer mistreatment.

[cosmotic]

What is preventing this from happening to someone else?

[syabro]

Why was it deactivated?

[rsync]

"I work for Twilio and forwarded it internally."

For the love of christ will you please give us an 'email' verb in twiml ?

Or do you need sendgrid signups for some business metric and, therefore, this dead simple integration has to be avoided ?

[jariel]

The customer should sue Twillio into oblivion, or at least try to.

Can you imagine running a business and having a critical aspect of it just entirely stopped without warning or recourse?

People could lose their jobs during a pandemic due to ineptitude and systematic arrogance?

If you factor these kinds of risks into business equations, it does not look good.

Depending on Tech is starting to feel like US Health Insurance: you're 'covered' until you're 'not' in which case you're going bankrupt.

[macspoofing]

>Can you imagine running a business and having a critical aspect of it just entirely stopped without warning or recourse?

I understand what you're saying, but OP cannot alleviate their responsibility in this. You can't outsource your critical infrastructure to a third-party SAAS vendor and not have a plan for when things go tits up. OP didn't even know who to call. That's on them because they should have identified this as a risk long time ago.

[jariel]

If there was a reasonable recourse for the customer to take, and they were derelict, then obviously this is the case.

But it doesn't so much seem like this is the case, having tried to reach out through several channels.

There are two issues that stand out:

1) The power asymmetry - some large SaaS vendors provide critical infrastructure to customers - like financial service providers to small business. There are tons of regulations in that industry because that.

2) The lack of recourse as standard practice in new high tech. If your bank magically stops you from collecting VISA at your corner store - there's generally a human you can speak to, pretty much right away. You may be put on hold. I get relatively immediate customer service from my bank as a tiny retail customer. The lack of provisions here by the industry is a systematic problem.

[macspoofing]

>But it doesn't so much seem like this is the case, having tried to reach out through several channels.

It was too late now. When things are on fire, you're in panic-mode now. The reality is that if Twilio had shitty support today, they had shitty support last week and 6 months ago (etc.). That should have been identified by OP as a risk to their business and rectified (either by forging a relationship with someone at Twilio so you can backchannel support request, or identifying your account manager and making sure they are responsive, or moving to another vendor with better support). Twilio is a critical supplier for OP's company. You can't just assume they care about your business as much as you care about your business.

>he power asymmetry - some large SaaS vendors provide critical infrastructure to customers

OK. So? There are lots of things you can plan for and not control. None of us are fully in control of our circumstances. We can't control how trillion-dollar companies behave. We can't control the weather. What you can control is your actions, your planning and ultimately your response to things you can't control.

For example, I peeked at OPs comment history and he mentioned that their support line was provided by them (they provide telephony services and therefore they dog-food their products) ... was that the right move though? Because if they are down (or Twilio is down), their customers will need to talk to someone and won't be able to reach them. Maybe it makes sense to have another provider handle their support line (or at least have a backup).

The point is that, sure, Twilio screwed up - fully agree with that. Maybe OP can recover some damages, and maybe not. Maybe it isn't worth chasing Twilio through courts for years and spending thousands of dollars. Regardless, ultimately it is OP that suffered the consequences of Twilio's screw up, so OP should prepare themselves for this in the future. And don't tell me that there's nothing OP could have done. That's bullshit.