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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

#91

Post by manquer »

vbezhenar wrote: post #80
pierat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a CTO, you should make yourself aware of what a scream test is https://www.v-wiki.net/scream-test-meaning/ Basically, you just turn stuff off, and make people scream, while they can turn it back on. You could have did this a month ago, as a critical warning of impending termination of systems. You didn't do that. Instead, you sent a few emails, which itself isn't even a guaranteed delivery. Again, as a CTO, you sh…

You can't turn system off if customer paid for it. That's the breach of contract. If you keep customer data after payment period, you're losing money. So scream test will cost you money. They decided that this cost is not appropriate payment to compensate for possible reputation loss. Whether that's a good business decision or not, time will tell.

Good customer service costs money.

It takes years to build a good reputation and minutes to destroy it.

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

#92

Post by Nicholas_C »

fooker wrote: post #49

I can understand the outrage about deleted data, but has anyone figured out why they are shutting down in Belgium?

I haven’t seen a reason yet but I suspect they’re reducing the regions they’re hosting in to save costs.

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

#93

Post by jasfi »

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…

Then the title is misleading. Not everyone saw the email, many expected more, e.g. a scream test.

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

#94

Post by sieabahlpark »

StopHammoTime wrote: post #58

It seems this probably happened due to some regulation or other. The sunset date for the service should have been a month prior so that influx could have kept the data legally until the 30th in case of this situation happening. They wanted to have the euros flowing in right until the last minute. 1. Flash messages on all user facing consoles. 2. No new resource able to be created for 6 mo this. 3. Emails. 4. Service…

[dead]

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

#95

Post by throwaway64478 »

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…

How many times have you said influxdb is about managing the data lifecycle.

It is astonishing that you have literally completely ignored one of the primary USPs of your product.

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

StopHammoTime wrote: post #58

It seems this probably happened due to some regulation or other. The sunset date for the service should have been a month prior so that influx could have kept the data legally until the 30th in case of this situation happening. They wanted to have the euros flowing in right until the last minute. 1. Flash messages on all user facing consoles. 2. No new resource able to be created for 6 mo this. 3. Emails. 4. Service…

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by jlund-molfese »

imglorp wrote: post #62
SkyPuncher wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's pretty pathetic and your attitude "we can't help our customers" is even more damning. Email is not reliable enough to simply rely on a few email blasts for this. I would expect: * Those 3 "email blast" notifications. I'm guessing one of two things happened here: * You sent them as an "email blast" from a marketing-type email service. These hit email filters because they came from a known spam IP. * You se…

Another problem is that service providers frequently poison the email channel with important sounding engagement dreck and we are now conditioned to ignore it. * Important: migrate to this new feature immediately or you risk missing out!! Vs * Important: migrate your data immediately or you risk losing it!!

Plus, many companies abuse what I assume is an exemption to spam rules by pretending that their marketing emails are “service related”.

Xfinity is the worst about this. They’ll send me a so-called service-related email exhorting me to download their app. Same with Capital One and their monthly emails asking me to turn on automated texts.

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

#98

Post by lawn »

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?

Because it got marked as spam?

Because it's burried among lots of other similar looking emails that's just marketing garbage?

Because the email wasn't delivered?

Because the customer was on vacation and they expect a reply very quickly?

There's plenty of valid reasons to miss an email.

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

#99

Post by fnordpiglet »

pauldix wrote: post #33
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.

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.

Taking the region off line and making the data inaccessible at the same time was a big wrong call. I won’t hash over the other good suggestions here, but I would throw out there you should have turned off all data plans APIs for at least a month before deleting a byte of data. Nothing wakes up the customers attention than everything suddenly failing.

I think the attitude that “you pay us money so you better read every email we send” is at odds with reality.

1) why do you believe a single human being has that email address? As a company of any size I would never assign a human to a vendor email address. Turnover and rogue employee risks are too high for that. Usually these vendor emails are black holes only used to establish the account and recover credentials if needed. Or, it ends up in the hands of a vendor relations person who is more an accountant than engineer. Do you get the emails from GCP and AWS directly in your inbox?

2) because I pay you money I expect the opposite of the relationship you articulated. I’m not here to read your emails. If it’s really important then use my account manager to contact me. Make a phone call. Email is for spam - ESPECIALLY when it’s from a vendor. I view it as “I’m paying you money, vendor, so you need to go out of your way to give me excellent service” not “I’m paying you money so your emails are incredibly important to me I hang on your every dispatch”.

What baffles me is why on earth did you guys delete the data? I get you couldn’t afford to run the region for whatever reason. But you should have retained all the data. Storage isn’t that expensive.

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

#100

Post by apgwoz »

pauldix wrote: post #33
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.

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.

> 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 can empathize with this, but also would expect a good product organization to consider failure modes here and work around them.

Did anyone consider that bob@company.com left months ago, but since autopay still works, no one considered potential problems?

Did anyone consider Bob in accounting is paying the bill but ignores email that doesn’t have “balance due” in it?

… and a million other scenarios that are quite likely and need consideration.

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