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Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

news.ycombinator.com

71–80 of 531 posts

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#71
Cloud computing platforms are a bit of a double edged sword. I find it kind of ironic that big companies are moving their stuff to those services but they often have to rely on some consultancy firm that can deal with these problems. Congratulations, you had a problem and now you have two.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#72
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why stop at Google? Why don't we simply get rid of the idea of the mega corporation?[0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641

Because it’s regressive. We need to fix the issues, not throw the whole thing out.

These "issues" only exist because of the scale and reach of Corporations. You can not fix "too big to fail" issues unless you stop letting these institutions to grow too big in the first place.

I'm yet to hear a single convincing argument of why we need to have organizations of such a large scale nowadays. Could you make a case of what we would be missing if we just "threw the whole thing out"?

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#73
post #33

The law should come hard on this sort of shenanigans, but hitting on Big Tech has already become a political issue in the US, Europe is, in the end, too afraid to do it (bar some relatively minor extra taxes that Big Tech is all to happy to pay as long as it's not made legally liable in other ways), and here we are, with crazy stories like this one (one of many).

Counterpoint: GDPR

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#74
post #33

The law should come hard on this sort of shenanigans, but hitting on Big Tech has already become a political issue in the US, Europe is, in the end, too afraid to do it (bar some relatively minor extra taxes that Big Tech is all to happy to pay as long as it's not made legally liable in other ways), and here we are, with crazy stories like this one (one of many).

> Europe is, in the end, too afraid to do it

Take a look at the Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts on top of the already active GDPR.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#75

The company I work for has forbidden the use of Google and their services (if possible) such as GCP etc. due to how they treat their customers. In particular, there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the issue. We do not want the same to occur to our production systems if there is an overflow from a Play Store ban to GCP etc. The business risk is too high wh…

These are the ones that got the limelight. Multiply this list x100 to get the true number of fuckups.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#76
post #33

The law should come hard on this sort of shenanigans, but hitting on Big Tech has already become a political issue in the US, Europe is, in the end, too afraid to do it (bar some relatively minor extra taxes that Big Tech is all to happy to pay as long as it's not made legally liable in other ways), and here we are, with crazy stories like this one (one of many).

The law can only come if people sue And yes I think people should engage lawyers in cases like this. Even in small cases court if it's the case

> The law can only come if people sue

That's not true in the long run. Legislators can make arbitrary laws that ban or prescribe arbitrary things.

See eg how there are special laws in Spain and Australia that (try to) force specific behaviour from Google News. Behaviour that you can't override with a contract.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#77

The company I work for has forbidden the use of Google and their services (if possible) such as GCP etc. due to how they treat their customers. In particular, there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the issue. We do not want the same to occur to our production systems if there is an overflow from a Play Store ban to GCP etc. The business risk is too high wh…

Thank you for this collection of references.

The business continuity risk of using google is just too dangerous, while the odds are low, the consequences are disastrous for a business and there is never any recourse.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#78
post #4

Sorry, not really sorry. It has been well documented that any of the big tech companies will thankfully flush you and all you've build down the drain whenever they feel like that. You'll also probably never be able to talk to someone (high enough up the ladder) to figure things out. Nevertheless lots of people are building their tech and their lives based on the services provided by these companies, when a maliciousl…

Do we see much of this for AWS? Asking for a friend...

We've had some mishaps with Azure billing and they did call for a couple of days before they switched things off.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#79

The same is true of DigitalOcean, fwiw. Shutting down machines used in production with no notice, outside working hours. I don’t know why these companies don’t care - they’re massively shooting themselves in their feet. Incidents like this turn customers off for life.

I actually managed to get my account suspended one day due to nonpayment. It was just a personal toy project and it was completely my fault: I was automatically filtering the mails into a folder that I didn't read until it was too late.

If you look at the sheer amount of emails they sent me before suspending the account, Digital Ocean did everything right: https://i.imgur.com/ah13bEA.png

They gave lots of warnings and also sent an email with the date the account was going to be closed a week in advance.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#80
This calls for a "me too" moment where everyone shares their Google is terrible and I'll never use them again. Here are a couple of my favorites from our company:

https://medium.com/hackernoon/why-and-how-we-left-app-engine...

https://dev.to/codenameone/google-play-kafkaesque-experience...

There's this story from a couple of days ago which is shocking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805

Google is a terrible, dystopian company.

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