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InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

community.influxdata.com

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Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#31

Post by ghaff »

chillfox wrote: post #30
pauldix wrote: post #29

Hi, cofounder and CTO here. We notified everyone via email on February 23, April 6 and May 15th. We also offered to help migrate all users. I realize that it's not ideal that we've shut down this system, but we made our best efforts to notify affected users and give them options to move over to other regions. If you've been impacted by this, please email me personally and I will do my best to help out: paul at influx…

Email only is not even close to best effort. I know it’s standard to only do email for tech companies, but all other types of companies usually do physical mail and phone calls on top of emails for important notifications. I am not a customer, but it’s really annoying me how tech companies repeatedly think sending emails is somehow anything but the absolute minimum, most lazy option.

However, tech companies will often not have your physical address--unlike your bank. And I'd probably block phone calls from some tech company I was a customer of.

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#32

Post by fbdab103 »

linsomniac wrote: post #28

I like Influx, and have been using it for all our TSDB needs for ~7 years. It sounds like there have been a lot of shake-ups internally, all their hopes for Flux (the InfluxQL language) have been aborted. I'm wondering about how they're doing. This situation doesn't seem like it is specifically them doing anything wrong, if indeed they did send out multiple notifications over 6 months. It sounds like it's caught many…

3 emails over six months is pretty lousy notification rate. At minimum, something sent the month of the shutdown would be appropriate. More ideally, would be an aggressive notification push of increasing frequency the closer to the shutdown period. Was there any notification of the shutdown in the admin panels? The person with the ability to migrate data may not be the person receiving the messages.

EDIT: Also, does the company have a Sales team? Why is that not a top line item for representative to contact those who have active service in the region to emphasize the shutdown? Or was the Sales team similarly in the dark about the messaging?

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#33

Post by pauldix »

chillfox wrote: post #30
pauldix wrote: post #29

Hi, cofounder and CTO here. We notified everyone via email on February 23, April 6 and May 15th. We also offered to help migrate all users. I realize that it's not ideal that we've shut down this system, but we made our best efforts to notify affected users and give them options to move over to other regions. If you've been impacted by this, please email me personally and I will do my best to help out: paul at influx…

Email only is not even close to best effort. I know it’s standard to only do email for tech companies, but all other types of companies usually do physical mail and phone calls on top of emails for important notifications. I am not a customer, but it’s really annoying me how tech companies repeatedly think sending emails is somehow anything but the absolute minimum, most lazy option.

We get an email address because we need to contact our customers. After that we make best efforts but if people can’t respond to vendors they pay money to, we’re really at a loss. I realize that shutting down a region isn’t good. It’s not what we would have preferred, but we had to do it for the business. And we made an honest effort to contact all customers to help move them.

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#34

Post by js2 »

pauldix wrote: post #29

Hi, cofounder and CTO here. We notified everyone via email on February 23, April 6 and May 15th. We also offered to help migrate all users. I realize that it's not ideal that we've shut down this system, but we made our best efforts to notify affected users and give them options to move over to other regions. If you've been impacted by this, please email me personally and I will do my best to help out: paul at influx…

Paul: I'm surprised you didn't do a scream test. Not everyone is going to see those emails and even those that do may not understand what they are reading.

Internally at my company we always do scream tests as part of our EOL process because we know we can't reach everyone, even our own employees.

https://www.microsoft.com/insidetrack/blog/microsoft-uses-a-...

Fun story: my mortgage got sold last year. Not the first time. I got emails from the old mortgage company and the new mortgage company about the sale, but I skimmed them. I got letters via USPS from the old and new mortgage companies, but I mostly ignored those because 95% of what mortgage companies send me via USPS is junk. So I missed the fact that my automatic payments didn't transfer over. The new mortgage company let me get four months in arrears before they finally FedEx'd me something overnight. That got my attention. I was like: you guys should've FedEx'd me this in the first place. For all they knew, I wasn't getting their emails or letters in the first place because nothing had been sent signature required.

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#35

Post by throwawaysleep »

chillfox wrote: post #30
pauldix wrote: post #29

Hi, cofounder and CTO here. We notified everyone via email on February 23, April 6 and May 15th. We also offered to help migrate all users. I realize that it's not ideal that we've shut down this system, but we made our best efforts to notify affected users and give them options to move over to other regions. If you've been impacted by this, please email me personally and I will do my best to help out: paul at influx…

Email only is not even close to best effort. I know it’s standard to only do email for tech companies, but all other types of companies usually do physical mail and phone calls on top of emails for important notifications. I am not a customer, but it’s really annoying me how tech companies repeatedly think sending emails is somehow anything but the absolute minimum, most lazy option.

Why do customers believe that they don’t need to read their emails?

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#36

Post by fooster »

tredre3 wrote: post #4

> According to the support, the notification emails to the users were sent on Feb 23, Apr 6 and May 15th. However, we did not receive those at all. If true, this is concerning. One message getting lost in spam understandable. But three over 6 months would imply they're being blacklisted and/or their mail sender is simply broken. Do serious companies not have canaries or other checks in place to ensure their notificat…

Customers ignore emails newsflash. For our SASS service it isn’t uncommon for customers who are administrative contacts and technical contacts to spam their emails and/or generally ignore emails on all varieties of topics. If they’ve supplied valid phone numbers typically they don’t work either.

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#37

Post by noveltyaccount »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #35
chillfox wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email only is not even close to best effort. I know it’s standard to only do email for tech companies, but all other types of companies usually do physical mail and phone calls on top of emails for important notifications. I am not a customer, but it’s really annoying me how tech companies repeatedly think sending emails is somehow anything but the absolute minimum, most lazy option.

Why do customers believe that they don’t need to read their emails?

Lmao are you serious? What about emails buried in spam? What if contact x left the company and the emails are black holes? There are a million valid reasons for emails to go poof. "But we emailed you" is weak.

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#38

Post by jlund-molfese »

js2 wrote: post #34
pauldix wrote: post #29

Hi, cofounder and CTO here. We notified everyone via email on February 23, April 6 and May 15th. We also offered to help migrate all users. I realize that it's not ideal that we've shut down this system, but we made our best efforts to notify affected users and give them options to move over to other regions. If you've been impacted by this, please email me personally and I will do my best to help out: paul at influx…

Paul: I'm surprised you didn't do a scream test. Not everyone is going to see those emails and even those that do may not understand what they are reading. Internally at my company we always do scream tests as part of our EOL process because we know we can't reach everyone, even our own employees. https://www.microsoft.com/insidetrack/blog/microsoft-uses-a-... Fun story: my mortgage got sold last year. Not the first…

I even (sort of) do this when I'm deprecating something which my team is the only user of, because sometimes it's hard to tell if something's really unused! First shut off the VPC access while leaving all the other infrastructure and data intact, wait a week or two and see if everything breaks, then get rid of everything else

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#39

Post by ikiris »

adrr wrote: post #26
arp242 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a spam service erroneously marks one email as spam, chances are it will also marks other very similar emails as spam. So it's not too surprising all three were marked. For these kind of automated emails getting all emails consistently being delivered to everyone is really hard, almost impossible. The problem here isn't really that emails weren't being delivered, it's that they seem to have tried only one method to…

It could end up in the promotions tab or update tab that no one checks.

If you send out spammy notices, yep.

Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

#40

Post by throwawaysleep »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #37
throwawaysleep wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do customers believe that they don’t need to read their emails?

Lmao are you serious? What about emails buried in spam? What if contact x left the company and the emails are black holes? There are a million valid reasons for emails to go poof. "But we emailed you" is weak.

You actually need to read your spam to check and if a company didn’t bother transition an employee out properly (i.e figure out what their email address was attached to), why is that on the supplier?

Why do they need to move mountains so that you can avoid any seriousness about your own operations?

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