painful reminder that you need to test payment processing code, by hand or however, after updating it.
i've run some ecommerce sites and this is basic stuff - new payment modules, time to test card processing works properly.
Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
31–40 of 123 posts
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't matter how good you think are. If you write code professionally for long enough, you eventually experience an event like this first hand. It's an absolutely horrible experience for a developer.
Being a professional developer is hard. That's why it's generally a high paying position, because you solve hard problems and are accountable for the results. So stop making excuses. An organization of this scale should be taking serious precautions (against code errors, bad hardware, malicious attacks, network problems, compiler bugs, cosmic ray induced bit errors, etc.) when building a credit card processor. If som…
But robobrobro claimed they didn't know how to code, which is a completely different thing.
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#33For people commenting about overdraft charges, Dreamhost went through this a while back. I was in college at the time, and didn't realize they'd drafted a second charge to my account. A series of small transactions later, and I was $300 in the red with very little income to fix it. They offered to reimburse overdraft fees for those affected, but I never was reimbursed. This is also great as a "how not to tell custome…
I'd say, as a general rule, don't put engineers into a PR role and expect it to go smoothly.
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#34Haha, the one time in my life having an outdated credit card on file paid off.
Better double-check. Sometimes credit card companies allow charges to continue to flow through old, expired, even cancelled / compromised credit cards. I learned first-hand that a card can still process charges after AMEX allowed about 7 months of Netflix charges to continue to be processed from a card number I'd reported compromised.
My bank hit me with a fee when Dreamhost charged an expired card ... It was my fault for not keeping my account up-to-date but it does seem like the kind of thing their billing code could check.
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#35Wow. Seriously? Learn to code.
Doesn't matter how good you think are. If you write code professionally for long enough, you eventually experience an event like this first hand. It's an absolutely horrible experience for a developer.
I work in banking and when a piece of our code went down due to failing to handle load correctly during a market announcement the business was able to say they lost, in that 7 minute period ~£90k.
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that constructive at all? Shit happens. My code has bugs, your code has bugs. Just about everyone has something break at some point. At least Twilio has some reasonable disclosure of these issues on their dashboard to inform people of what is going on. I'm sure they will rectify the issue as soon as they have everything back up and running.
That is why companies should be made accountable for software errors, just like most industries.
How about we just stick to what we have (freedom of contract) and solve disputes according to the terms and conditions we agreed on, maybe with some PR gestures on top.
Imagine a world where Saas vendors would be liable for economic loss their software bugs generated. You'd have to fill in a huge questionnaire to sign up and everybody would be paying a tailored, very high price to cover all the risks. Every software vendor would be in the insurance business.
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#37I'm glad they (and most of us) are not in the business of making insulin pumps or other software where such bugs could have potentially lethal consequences.
Perhaps with nano-tech we can eliminate this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_withdrawn_drugs
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#38el.khloud@yahoo.com
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#39For people commenting about overdraft charges, Dreamhost went through this a while back. I was in college at the time, and didn't realize they'd drafted a second charge to my account. A series of small transactions later, and I was $300 in the red with very little income to fix it. They offered to reimburse overdraft fees for those affected, but I never was reimbursed. This is also great as a "how not to tell custome…
What's wrong with the Dreamhost post? He specifically says:
>"The end to this story is that of course, I’m very very sorry, we’re very very sorry, and I’m sure you’re very very sorry this happened. I really am. I understand the sort of problems that an unexpected large charge to your credit card (or worse yet, your debit card) can cause. If the tone of this blog post seemed a little light, I apologize I don’t mean to offend and I realize how serious an issue this is."
I can see why you'd still be annoyed about not getting your charges refunded though. What happened there? Frankly, if your bank didn't refund them when you told them what happened, they seem pretty scummy. I hope you dumped them as soon as you could!
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#40Rob from Twilio here. We are still actively working on this incident and aware that erroneous auto-recharge billing and account suspensions have occurred for a number of customers.
If this has happened to your account, please send an email to help@twilio.com where we have our support team working on making this right for everyone affected. We are spinning up additional resources to make sure every customer issue gets resolved as quickly as we can.
Link for this article goes to our status board which serves as the authoritative source of information on this incident. We will be delivering updates every half hour or as new information becomes available.
We are very sorry. This is far short of our commitment to you. We'll have more on the incident and what we will do to make this right later today.