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Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#51

Post by disiplus »

karlkloss wrote: post #36
oarsinsync wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS provides a service that you can use as a commodity, and with appropriate backups, can easily recover from. DNS is the magic here. Unfortunately (with the exception of SIP dialling, which is extremely niche) there is no DNS for telephony. If your provider cuts you off, you can’t transparently move away, and number porting is slow .

> there is no DNS for telephony. In fact there is: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2332977/lan-wan-what-is... Only most telephony providers sabotage it.

afaik the numbers are associated to a provider, they get blocks of XXXX numbers. it would not help somebody to have enum on the provider level. because they are stuck there. Numbers are more like IP addresses and less like domains.

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#52

Post by gtsop »

morrbo wrote: post #39
work_for_x wrote: post #28

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.

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..

> 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.

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#53

Post by gtsop »

duiker101 wrote: post #50
probably_wrong wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#54

Post by newbie578 »

Yikes, talk about bad PR. I am sorry that this happened to you, but thank you for sharing this, you are not the first one, nor the last one by the looks of it.

I intend to avoid Twilio in a wide range, don't need that kind of a "business partner" in my life.

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#55

Post by gscott »

_ikfm wrote: post #33
work_for_x wrote: post #28

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.

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.

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.

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#56

Post by thinkingemote »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #35

Maybe time for a new HN headline convention, like: Tell FAANG: You blocked me, again FAANG Support: Important please call back ASAP

Could this be productised somehow? Would an investor be willing to invest in my startup which effectively un-blocks small companies from larger ones? It would do the leg work to compile the necessary information before contacting a real human.

I'll call it Support As A Service.

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#57

Post by ZephyrBlu »

ovi256 wrote: post #43
Rastonbury wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the the fraudster make money, not familiar with the concept of premium numbers. EDIT: Oh premium numbers charge the sender

The fraudsters setup premium numbers with some other telephony provider, possibly in another country. Then they use those numbers to receive 2FA (two factor auth) passwords (either SMS or read aloud in calls). Because the defrauded party's servers called those premium numbers through Twilio, the defrauded party has to pay Twilio. AFAIK there's no easy way to always, securely detect premium numbers. The fraudster can…

Wow. That's a lot of words for Twilio to say "we won't help you mitigate toll fraud".

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#58

Post by dx034 »

holoduke wrote: post #25

Welcome to the new world where tech companies rule. Where moral standards are gone. Where local laws do not apply. This shit is happening a lot. Artists on Youtube, App builders on Playstore/iOS. Marketing companies on Google search, pretty women on Instagram, political men on Facebook or Twitter. I feel for you. Hope it gets alright.

It's really frustrating. I've been trying for months to get access to a suspended twitter account that was suspended without informing me or giving a reason. The tickets get ignored and their support doesn't respond on Twitter. They also ignore GDPR (which would give me the right to have my data deleted). I have no idea what to do. The account isn't important but it shows up prominently on Google as a suspended account which isn't great.

Any small company ignoring privacy laws would get into trouble. If you're as big as Twitter or Facebook you can just ignore laws and get away with it..

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#59

Post by ZephyrBlu »

gtsop wrote: post #52
morrbo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

> 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.

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

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#60

Post by roblabla »

ovi256 wrote: post #43
Rastonbury wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the the fraudster make money, not familiar with the concept of premium numbers. EDIT: Oh premium numbers charge the sender

The fraudsters setup premium numbers with some other telephony provider, possibly in another country. Then they use those numbers to receive 2FA (two factor auth) passwords (either SMS or read aloud in calls). Because the defrauded party's servers called those premium numbers through Twilio, the defrauded party has to pay Twilio. AFAIK there's no easy way to always, securely detect premium numbers. The fraudster can…

The real fraud here seems to be the telephony industry's concept of a premium number. That there isn't an enforced standardized way to tell that a phone number will incur extra fees to contact is a failure of the industry. This shouldn't be a hard problem.
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