[akerl_]

They’ve really buried the lede here: this reads like the person paying for the account was not the post author, and AWS asked the payer (who from their perspective is the owner of the account) for information.

That person wasn’t around to respond.

[blargey]

The lede buried under that lede is that (according to an insider?) some AWS employee accidentally wiped everything immediately (contrary to typical practice in such situations of retaining data while things get sorted out), leading to a chain of brushing-off / covering-up percolating through whatever support chain the OP was talking to.

[akerl_]

That does seem to be a mistake on their part. And the comms we’re seeing look bad.

But the overall post and the double buried ledes make me question the degree to which we’re getting the whole story.

[Ancapistani]

> And the comms we’re seeing look bad.

Right or wrong, those messages look like very standard AWS-speak for "this is your mistake, not ours".

I have no idea if that's a reasonable stance or not, but I _will_ say that AWS's internal culture contributes to this sort of bad press. If they would respond to their customers with even a trace of empathy and ownership, this post would likely never have been written.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

If that's the case, then the mistake isn't that a support agent made the mistake, the mistake is that such a mistake was even possible.

[akerl_]

I really love this game of debating the appropriate derivative of a mistake.

Maybe the mistake was inventing non-immutable data storage?

[yongjik]

I find that story really hard to believe. In a company the size of Amazon, I can't imagine a rogue employee running a tool that can willy-nilly wipe out customers' data without several levels of manager approval.

Besides, what would be the potential benefit of such a hypothetical script? The author mentions "a bill under $200," so that's the upper limit on how much it costs AWS to keep the author's whole data. If I was working there and a coworker said "Hey I created a script that can save the company $200 by finding a defunct (but paying) customer and wiping out their data!", I'd have replied "What the fuck is wrong with you."

[seuros]

The idea of a rogue AWS team running a deletion script without oversight should sound ridiculous. At a company that size of AWS, you will expect guardrails, audits, approvals.

But here is the thing: no one from AWS has given me an official explanation. Not during the 20-day support hell, not after termination, not even when I asked directly: “Does my data still exist?” Just a slow drip of templated replies, evasions, and contradictions.

An AWS insider did reach out claiming it was an internal test gone wrong, triggered by a misused --dry flag and targeting At a company that size, you'd expect guardrails, audits, approvals low-activity accounts.

According to them, the team ran it without proper approval. Maybe it is true. Maybe they were trying to warn me. Maybe its a trap to get me to throw baseless accusations and discredit myself.

I'm not presenting that theory as fact. I don’t know what happened behind the wall.

What I do know is:

- My account was terminated without following AWS’s own 90-day retention policy

- I had a valid payment method on file

- Support stonewalled every direct question for 20 days

- No answers were provided, even post-mortem

[cmckn]

> accidentally wiped everything immediately

There is no “wipe everything immediately” button.

[anonymars]

Did you read the article?

> According to them, AWS MENA was running some kind of proof of concept on “dormant” and “low-activity” accounts. Multiple accounts were affected, not just mine.

If AWS has a 90-day closure policy, why was this account deleted so quickly?

[akerl_]

"did you read the article" is the canonical example of what not to put in comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[CRConrad]

Sure. But so is posting comments that clearly show one didn't read the article.

Or at least, if it isn't, it certainly should be.

[luckylion]

The payer is the owner of the account? I doubt that is AWS' default stance, because their contract is with the account holder, not the payer.

Me paying your bill doesn't give me ownership of your stuff - as far as AWS is concerned, your bill is paid, and that's the extent of their involvement, everything else is between you and me.

If what he writes is true, he remained the account holder and even had a backup billing method in place - something he probably wouldn't have if he wasn't the account holder.

I don't know if he's completely honest about the story, but "somebody else paid, so we decided they are now the owner" isn't how that works.

[seuros]

The person paying the account is not the author, i'm.

What happen is that the person paying for the account had to settle an invoice of many thousand of dollars. They offered me AWS gift cards,to send me electronics and they will pay for it in parts.

They lost lot of money because of crypto collapse. So i accepted their solution to pay for my OSS usage for few months.

That like if i was going to pay for your rent for 1 year. You don't pay, while i don't have to pay 3-4 years of your rent at once.

What happen, is that AWS dropped a nuclear bomb in your house, in the middle of the month .. then tell you later that it was about payment.

If they told me in the first email it was about the payer, i will have unlinked and backuped.

[floating-io]

While that is certainly true, the idea that they can so rapidly decimate your data without the possibility to restore is still terrifying if that's your only copy of that data.

They should have to hold it for at least 90 days. In my opinion, it should be more like six months to a year.

In my mind, it's exactly equivalent to a storage space destroying your car five days after you miss a payment. They effectively stole and destroyed the data when they should have been required to return it to the actual owner.

Of course, that's my opinion of how it should be. AFAIK, there is no real legal framework, and how it actually is is entirely up to your provider, which is one reason I never trust them.

[akerl_]

The post suggests that even if AWS’s policy had been to hold the data for a year, the same thing would have happened, because they deleted the data early due to operator error.

Similarly, a physical storage company can totally make a mistake and accidentally destroy your stuff if they mix up their bookkeeping, and your remedy is generally either to reach an amicable settlement with them or sue them for your damages.

[adastra22]

It sounds like it wasn’t OP’s data though, which is an important distinction.

[anonymars]

That's not the impression I got

> When AWS demanded this vanished payer validate himself, I pointed out that I already had my own Wise card on file—the same card I’d used to pay before the payer arrangement, kept active specifically in case the payer disconnected while I was traveling or offline

[nerdponx]

It was his, along with his clients' data.