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by tomrod 1710 days ago
With all due respect, it has nothing to do with culture and more to do with business processes having rough edges. At AWS' scale, any rough edge is more than a rare edge case, since rarity flies out the window.

Spending more to provide better customer service (explicitly or implicitly through bugfixes) is not generally how this type of need is. Folks shouldn't need to post their grievances to a very public site to be heard, and that it needs to happen to get traction on an issue should be taken as a clear gap in customer service provision.

2 comments

That's kind of his point though, OP did not need to post to HN, he can just contact AWS Support and get the bucket deleted at (probably) no charge.

Support will routinely give forgive an account balance given a good enough reason.

From the comment:

> I've had to ask my credit card company to block AWS charging an account that I can't remember the login to.

We don't know whether OP has reached out to AWS support, but one can assume so since AWS is charging an account the user cannot log in to.

Further, it sounds like the user has found their own resolution, so the user isn't asking for _help_ on HN, more that they are registering poor experience in agreement with others. So, it is a rough UX edge.

You wrote:

> Folks shouldn't need to post their grievances to a very public site to be heard, and that it needs to happen to get traction on an issue should be taken as a clear gap in customer service provision.

Yet by your very own comment you say that we don't know if he actually tried to contact support so there is no "clear gap in customer service provision".

The fact is, anyone who actually interacted with an AWS rep would tell you that they would delete the bucket and not charge you for it.

From my own experience, no you can't. All links to cknta t support require you to have an active AWS account. That defeats the purpose. YMMV as in maybe it's different today but that was my experience. And I was just trying to them to stop sending me spam after I had closed out my account.
It's weird to see hackers here posting this as AWS is literally the only web scale company I can actually talk to a person at to resolve rough edges.

This is both on retail side and AWS side.

My only request - do some more automated discovery and remediation tooling for VPC-classic accounts! It's annoying to figure out what needs to be handled there - give me a dashboard for this.