[ChrisDutrow]

UPDATE:::::

Due to Greg from Twilio seeing this post and providing me a way to reach out, I was able to get the problem resolved.

He spent about an hour on the phone with me today and provided some more information about the issue. A few highlights:

* Twilio has doubled in size since the beginning of the pandemic * Spamming and phishing through text message has gotten a lot more common very recently.

These two things together caused a sort of novel situation with them having to either auto-ban accounts of ban accounts with only a very shallow look and then not having a way for someone to get the account un-banned in a timely manner.

My initial concern with this post was that something had changed within the company culture where they were willing to cull off "smaller" accounts like mine in the $10,000 a year range by treating them very recklessly so that they only needed to work with very large companies which would be more simple and more profitable. This would mean that I would need to change providers or risk them doing other damaging things in the future that I would not be able to predict.

Based on a few things that Greg said in the conversation, I no longer believe this to be the case for a few reasons:

1) They have people like Greg reaching out to people like me at all. 2) In case Greg was not available the next time something like this happened, he provided me the contact information of some other people who were kind of high up in the company and explained that they would be very concerned that something like this was going on where legitimate customer accounts were being suspended.

This changed my interpretation of the situation because Greg's actions communicated to me that this is a temporary problem having to do with Twilio increasing in size very quickly at the same time spam and phishing became a big problem. They had to scramble to fix a problem with their providers before having a chance to refine their systems to make sure the implementation was done fairly and correctly. It does not seem to be a problem with top-level executives deciding that customers like me don't matter.

I also own a company and am very familiar with how things can get out of hand very quickly when demand increases. Shit hits the fan, then things suck for a while until the work is put in to become more organized. This takes time. And it takes trial and error.

I would expect over time for them to correct their systems and properly service smaller mid-range customers like me.

[pauldd7]

They only have people like Greg reaching out to you when your problem is posted on HN. They would have continued to ignore you had you not had the same reaction on HN. They've screwed up big time with us in the past and Greg wasn't reaching out.

[ChrisDutrow]

What was the nature of the problem you had with them?

Mostly I can forget they exist and do other things with my business. But my use case is very vanilla: no outbound automated marketing, its used by only a few people at my specific company, we're not even a tech company -just blue collar stuff.

This year has been different though. I had to verify that I had a real business so that my number didn't get blocked on certain carriers, submitting the paperwork in the right way turned out to be kind of difficult, however I don't think this was something they had control over if I understand the situation correctly. One of the carriers blocked us anyway (They were blocking text messages with links to job info that I was sending to my employees). I used the ticketing system to get that problem fixed and they resolved it in a few days - I was under the impression it was kind of a complex problem too.

They also help us port numbers in from cell phones sometimes. And again the ticketing system is slow but they always get the problems resolved. None of these things being time sensitive, we were perfectly happy.

This type of thing is a difficult business problem for small and mid size businesses to solve. In this particular situation, I had a series of actions I was going to take to put out this particular fire. Normally I wouldn't do something like this, but my back was to the wall: * Call their sales number so I could plead my case to a real person within the company and have them put me in contact with someone * If that person refused - Call again and try with another sales person (This approach did not work because no one was answering the phone for sales, perhaps due to covid omicron?) * Post on HackerNews to see if I could get the attention of one of the brand ambassadors. (This worked, so I did not have to move on to the next steps) * Post on StackOverflow to see if I could get the attention of one of the brand ambassadors * Post on Reddit to see if I could get the attention of one of the brand ambassadors * Use LinkedIn to track down people who worked at Twilio. Use a paid service to get their phone numbers and addresses from their names. Call some of the people. * If no one answered the phone, go by the houses of Twilio employees who lived in my area

Long term, I wasn't sure what I would do because getting all the code switched to another provider would have been a huge hassle and it would have seriously gotten in the way of some of my other business development efforts. So I'm glad that Greg and Jeff reached out and reassured me that they don't intend to run their business this way.

A more difficult problem is Google and Facebook. I have had valuable pages stolen from me on both platforms (ex-employee) And neither company would engage with me. We're talking maybe $100,000 in lost property because of the amount of business the pages would bring in. Someone mentioned in another post on here that people are actually able to use HackerNews to get Google's attention. If I had known this I would have tried that. I knew Twilio might respond because they very often would help me when I posted technical questions on Stackoverflow in the past. I didn't think google and facebook cared as much about their brand because they have a monopoly.

[pauldd7]

You definitely did the right thing to get an urgent response. It's a shame you had to, but in your position I would do the same. Glad you've got it sorted, and it seems like you have some great suggestions in the thread to avoid this in future and have some contacts to help you out.

In my case, we sent over a ticket to port a number between accounts, and they ended up deleting our entire account, numbers, and all recordings and logs. They admitted it they made a mistake and processed the wrong ticket, but also flat out told us they couldn't recover anything. We were instructed to make a new account and they gave us our numbers back, but all our audio recordings, call logs, sms history etc was gone, all our SIDs, number ID's etc were different.

We have all screwed up, but we try to put things right. With Twilio it seems if they screw up, it's easier to leave you unhappy than do anything to fix it, unless you post on HN it seems.

Plivo is cheaper for phone numbers, free incoming SMS, and cheaper to send SMS.

[ChrisDutrow]

Holy. Shit.

That would have been a freaking disaster if that happened to us, especially having to re-tool the application for new SIDs. I'm a little surprised that there is not a cooling off period after an account deletion as opposed to deleting everything immediately.

At least you got the numbers back.