While it's unlikely that Appointment Reminder is one of Twilio's largest accounts, we do have a number of customers in the Eastern Standard time zone, and due to customer usage patterns we have a predictable spike in outgoing calls and SMS messages which happened to coincide with the early-morning PST Twilio problem.
Under normal circumstances, I have Twilio set up to bill us $500 if the balance ever dips below $500. That $500 is our rebilling increment. Each SMS message and phone call we made caused us to get charged our rebilling increment. We hit $3,500 before our credit card company started rejecting charges. I think that if they hadn't, we would likely have saturated our credit line.
I'm thrilled with Twilio's response to this issue, and most other transient issues I've had being a Twilio customer. The system is mostly rock-solid reliable. I actually went to bed during the middle of this event (midnight, Japan time) because a) my systems were reporting that our messages were successfully going out (so no customer-visible downtime) and b) I had total confidence in Twilio to take care of things. And they did.
An incident like this is pretty painful for every customer affected. Hope they feel this explanation, the prompt refund of the erroneous charges and credit represents to them it is a pain we very much share.
Under normal circumstances, I have Twilio set up to bill us $500 if the balance ever dips below $500. That $500 is our rebilling increment. Each SMS message and phone call we made caused us to get charged our rebilling increment. We hit $3,500 before our credit card company started rejecting charges. I think that if they hadn't, we would likely have saturated our credit line.
I'm thrilled with Twilio's response to this issue, and most other transient issues I've had being a Twilio customer. The system is mostly rock-solid reliable. I actually went to bed during the middle of this event (midnight, Japan time) because a) my systems were reporting that our messages were successfully going out (so no customer-visible downtime) and b) I had total confidence in Twilio to take care of things. And they did.