Do the affected customers have legal recourse to get back their data AND a hefty compensation for the downtime?
InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
211–220 of 278 posts
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#212Hi, 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…
> we made our best efforts to notify affected users You call three emails (the last of which was almost 2 months ago) "best efforts"? I had to read your message three times because this is so reality-defying preposterous I just couldn't believe I didn't miss anything. How about warnings on the dashboard? How about an intentional error (or limited service interruption) so that people would log in to their dashboard?
> How about warnings on the dashboard?
They did have a warning on the dashboard, problem is a lot of people don't check the dashboard because they don't need to, as they just view everything through grafana, etc.
They also had a notice on the status page
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
The consumer nearly always bears 100% of the costs - because most companies sell at a profit. The final price is a combination of all costs incurred + a profit percentage imposed on the consumer. If all customers would receive fedex mail, then the costs of this fedex would be pushed on them somehow. Probably by making them pay slightly higher interest rates or by introducing some one off handling fee.
Profits aren't a fixed number.
Of course not, but financial products are priced and offered with a financial outcome (usually a margin) in mind. If you make mortgage processing more expensive, you'll find the offers for origination are worse than if mortgage processing were less expensive.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much better is to stop the service but add button "Resume" that re-enables service for two more weeks with no data loss. That way you give users opportunity to gracefully migrate away. Stopping service and immediately delete data is just callous.
When ovh sunsetted a class of VPSen and I'd completely failed to notice they were going to do that, I asked nicely in the support ticket I'd sent in and they turned it back on for a few days while I shifted the data to a replacement (which was still an ovh VPS, it had been Just Working long enough that I didn't feel like I'd been mistreated, more lulled into complacency by the lack of problems). I think requiring a t…
I mean this is why you do these projects on two different timelines: The internal timeline and the external timeline.
Externally you communication: Different announcements each month, final notices at T+5M, System will be deleted at T+6M, data will be lost at that point and so on.
Internally (at least at work) such a timeline is more that at T+6M, we cut access to the systems. Afterwards, systems not accessed for 2-4 weeks are removed periodically and the hard removal is planned for T+9M. Customer support and account managers can manage if systems need to be accessed. If a customer needs the system for a longer time, they can, but then they pay for it. Entirely with all necessary infrastructure, not renting a few licenses on the system.
Call it a bit callous, but this allows our customer support to appear nice and in control. And it leaves the customer happy and relieved that we have left some slack and leeway. But they've been shaken and woken up and can get to migrating.
The biggest challenge here is to stay on it and to not allow customers to become complacent again. This can be done by e.g. limiting the reactivation time to a week or so so they have to get on it.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Profits aren't a fixed number.
Of course not, but financial products are priced and offered with a financial outcome (usually a margin) in mind. If you make mortgage processing more expensive, you'll find the offers for origination are worse than if mortgage processing were less expensive.
Sorry, it's a ridiculous argument. Mortgages get bought and sold all the time and clearly the buyers are on the hook for the communications costs and these do not pre-emptively get priced into future products by the sellers. I'm sure that there are situations where your argument has merit but this isn't one of those.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#216I can understand the outrage about deleted data, but has anyone figured out why they are shutting down in Belgium?
Given they shut down (sorry, duscontinued) both Belgium DCs and Oceania DCs, I'm guessing "cost". I know ap-southeast tends to be pricier, I'm assuming Belgium was the same.
There's a small increase in cost compared to the cheapest US regions, but the European regions are still significantly cheaper than the expensive Australia/Brazil regions.
https://www.concurrencylabs.com/blog/choose-your-aws-region-...
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
In case anyone else is wondering: > The Scream Test is simple – remove it and wait for the screams. If someone screams, put it back. The Scream Test can be applied to any product, service or capability – particularly when there is poor ownership or understanding of it’s importance. https://www.v-wiki.net/scream-test-meaning/
Maybe this is the scream test…just done badly
that's not the scream test, that's the nuke test - nuke it and see if anyone complains, if they do, it's already too late
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#218It 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…
It's a cost-cutting measure that reeks of a company trying to cut costs as fast as possible.
Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#219Re: InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody is complaining about the database, they're complaining about poor communication. It could happen with anything that depends on a 3rd party.
> Nobody is complaining about the database https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36663023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36661448
yeah no, the people complaining about their deleted data clearly wanted to keep using it - so much so, they didn't expect anything close to migrating away to another location