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

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

#91

Post by capableweb »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #59
gtsop wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not really true. If you manage to get a "Google locked me out for no reason" post to hover on the frontpage of HN for a couple of hours, you most likely will get help from some Google insider. There are been plenty of such posts on HN where the issue has been resolved by what I assume to be HN-googlers.

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

#92

Post by jariel »

_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.

Try to find an alternative service supplier at very minimum for back up and consider legal recourse.

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

#93

Post by Symbiote »

blowski wrote: post #77
ksajadi wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it adds insult to injury. One of the suggestions by Twilio is to use their service to check the number and send only to mobile numbers. The issue? Twilio charges per call for that service! So you pay them to "possibly" stop you paying them more and fraudsters. The whole thing stinks

Is there some kind of regex for premium rate vs standard numbers?

In some countries.

For example, all UK mobile phone numbers begin 07 (i.e. +44 7), fixed/special rate 08, and premium rate 09.

But SMS also has "short codes", which is probably what's being abused here. 5 or 6 digit numbers, usually used for things like "Text 12345 to donate €2 to this charity" or "Send 'CXM' to 12345 and receive a message telling you when the next bus comes to this stop, costs 10¢".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_the_Unite...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_code

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

#94

Post by framerate »

ajimix wrote: post #30

We had the same problem some months ago with Mailgun. They blocked our account after many years using them without apparent reason or prior notice and took them 2 days to unblock it, leaving our thousands of clients stranded without receiving any of our transactional emails. Lesson learnt, always keep a backup for crucial services and move away from Mailgun

We just moved to Mailgun because SendGrid did something similar to us! Fortunately we only used SMTP so it was a straightforward change, but having a backup for something like Twilio Video would be quite an effort.

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

#95

Post by pjc50 »

dx034 wrote: post #61
blowski wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remove the tech-specific words from your comment, and you would probably find people saying the same thing throughout all of history.

Not sure if large car companies or clothes manufacturers (just two examples of large companies) were ever able to ignore legal rights of their customers. This has only become possible with digital services where companies refuse to acknowledge local laws and regulation.

> clothes manufacturers (just two examples of large companies) were ever able to ignore legal rights of their customers

Clothes manufacturers have been notorious for mistreating their employees, though; e.g. Triangle Shirtwaist.

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

#96

Post by macspoofing »

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.

>Welcome to the new world where tech companies rule.

I understand what you're saying but, speaking specifically to this case (which is a little different than YouTube censorship), I think this highlights the dangers of outsourcing your critical infrastructure to third-party SAAS companies without a mitigation plan.

As companies, we have to get into the habit of putting together mitigations plans for times when the outsourced SAAS disruption has significant business impact. Here, Twilio blocked the account of this vendor, but Twilio could have gone bankrupt, or they themselves could have had a significant disruption and the end-result would have been the same. Was there a plan put in place for that? If Twilio isn't responsive with support, are any of their competitors better? Maybe it was a better idea to go with a smaller or more expensive competitor but one who gives you a dedicated account manager you can call anytime if something goes wrong. Twilio fucked up here, but ultimately the responsibility for business continuity rests with OP. They can't offload that responsibility on Twilio because if Twilio fucks up, Twilio doesn't suffer the consequences.

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

#97

Post by ZephyrBlu »

capableweb wrote: post #91
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not really true. If you manage to get a "Google locked me out for no reason" post to hover on the frontpage of HN for a couple of hours, you most likely will get help from some Google insider. There are been plenty of such posts on HN where the issue has been resolved by what I assume to be HN-googlers.

It is true. I've seen multiple posts where Googlers or ex-Googlers with contacts can't get access to a locked Google account.

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

#98

Post by macspoofing »

Sorry to hear that. I hope everything works out.

Take this a learning experience. Once you get your business back, sit down with your team and come up with a mitigation plan because this may happen again. It's possible you may need to switch to another vendor, even one more expensive or smaller, but one with a dedicated support line and/or an account manager and stronger SLAs. Your business heavily relies on Twilio and you should have someone you can call at Twilio outside of the general support line. Maybe you need to attend their conferences and create a personal relationship with their developers or other employees so in cases like this you can backchannel your issue.

If you're going to outsource critical business infrastructure to third party SAAS vendors, make sure you have a plan for when things go tits up, because things will go tits up. It looks like Twilio screwed up here, but Twilio isn't going to suffer the consequences of this like your business will.

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

#99

Post by mcny »

thinkingemote wrote: post #56
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.

Makes sense.

1. If someone works at a company, they can sign up on our website as a support agent.

2. We will only list companies with which we have an authenticated contact, maybe require people to verify they got our authentication token on their employee email?

3. When someone contacts us about an issue with a company we support, we verify the request is genuine. Perhaps charge a small fee to block spam. (This is the problematic part. How do we know a problem is genuine without asking for potentially confidential information?)

4. Add all vetted requests to a private channel that all the people who volunteered on step one. (Can we pay our volunteer support agents? How? Does paying make things worse? Maybe gamify this step and send our volunteers gifts?)

5. Monitor performance of support agents to avoid giving false hope to our customers.

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

#100

Post by samdung »

ksajadi wrote: post #29

Sorry to hear. Twilio has changed since its early days. Last month, our bill went from $20 per month to $16,000. The reason: fraudsters use Twilio to setup premium numbers, then use Twilio customers (like us) to send OTPs to those numbers using bots. The result is us out of pocket, fraudsters and Twilio making money. Twilio is also the only Pay as you Go SaaS vendor that doesn’t have spend limits on accounts and advi…

You could try AWS SNS SMS. This is also PAYG. A wrapper like https://sendwithses.com might make your work easier.

EDIT: With AWS SNS SMS you can set a spending limit and your bill will never go over that.

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