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Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

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Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#41

Post by Rastonbury »

ksajadi wrote: post #29

Sorry to hear. Twilio has changed since its early days. Last month, our bill went from $20 per month to $16,000. The reason: fraudsters use Twilio to setup premium numbers, then use Twilio customers (like us) to send OTPs to those numbers using bots. The result is us out of pocket, fraudsters and Twilio making money. Twilio is also the only Pay as you Go SaaS vendor that doesn’t have spend limits on accounts and advi…

How the the fraudster make money, not familiar with the concept of premium numbers. EDIT: Oh premium numbers charge the sender

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#42

Post by ksec »

jackson1442 wrote: post #20
mdoms wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think the typical aws customer can easily recover from being banned?

From what I've heard surrounding the Parler incident, AWS worked _with_ Parler staff to get their data off the platform. Sure, it's not a hot-swap to Azure or metal or whatever, but it was nice to see that they didn't hold Parler's data hostage or just plain delete it. I'd assume the same courtesy would be extended to any customer, provided their ToS breaches aren't significantly worse (read: illegal) and it's not a…

>I'd assume the same courtesy would be extended to any customer

Unpopular opinion.

You see, I dont want assumption. I want guarantees. I also dont want a platform owner to remove you without some days if not weeks notice. I mean your landlord and court give you time for eviction. At least I hope that is true, I am not sure if time to vacate is universal across the world. They also give little to no time to solve any dispute.

I also dont like it when media spin that AWS is at least helping them move their Data off the platform as if it is something good. I dont know why it is perceived that way in the US, but that was absolutely the least they need to do and expected in EU or UK.

It is increasingly a worry sign. I have been yearning for an iOS Time Capsule for more than a decade. And the recent event makes it even more important. I want to own my things.

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#43

Post by ovi256 »

Rastonbury wrote: post #41
ksajadi wrote: post #29

Sorry to hear. Twilio has changed since its early days. Last month, our bill went from $20 per month to $16,000. The reason: fraudsters use Twilio to setup premium numbers, then use Twilio customers (like us) to send OTPs to those numbers using bots. The result is us out of pocket, fraudsters and Twilio making money. Twilio is also the only Pay as you Go SaaS vendor that doesn’t have spend limits on accounts and advi…

How the the fraudster make money, not familiar with the concept of premium numbers. EDIT: Oh premium numbers charge the sender

The fraudsters setup premium numbers with some other telephony provider, possibly in another country. Then they use those numbers to receive 2FA (two factor auth) passwords (either SMS or read aloud in calls). Because the defrauded party's servers called those premium numbers through Twilio, the defrauded party has to pay Twilio.

AFAIK there's no easy way to always, securely detect premium numbers. The fraudster can setup a forward from a normal number to a premium one anyway. So checking number prefix is useless. One could listen for the "After the beep, this call will be billed at X c/min" recording that premium numbers in honest countries have. The fraudsters manage to find less honest premium number providers that skip these.

This is a well enough known issue that Twilio has a page about it: https://www.twilio.com/learn/voice-and-video/toll-fraud

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#44

Post by electro_blah »

ksajadi wrote: post #29

Sorry to hear. Twilio has changed since its early days. Last month, our bill went from $20 per month to $16,000. The reason: fraudsters use Twilio to setup premium numbers, then use Twilio customers (like us) to send OTPs to those numbers using bots. The result is us out of pocket, fraudsters and Twilio making money. Twilio is also the only Pay as you Go SaaS vendor that doesn’t have spend limits on accounts and advi…

lol This reminded me about that comment about Heroku marketing email.

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#45

Post by yenoham »

Somewhat related anecdote. Whilst we didn't get cut off, we found a huge drop-off in time to receive, and the quality of, support from our live chat/support messaging provider.

Having been a customer since our launch [1], and very early after theirs, it has been really sad and frustrating to see that friendly distrupter energy zap out of the service.

I get why businesses go through that changes like this during growth, but it feels like all the things to let slide, your persona is not one of them!

[1] https://mailosaur.com (somewhat related to the thread we let you test SMS messages)

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#46

Post by electro_blah »

work_for_x wrote: post #28

I work for Twilio and forwarded it internally. If you are 6 years with the company, you probably have an AE assigned to your company or have been in touch with any other human being along the way? UPDATE: Your account should be active now.

LOL So, in which tier do people get the HN support?

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#47

Post by daniellarusso »

Our company phone system has several VOIP providers (including Twilio) as well as multiple inbound analog lines.

Two weeks ago, all of the analog lines stopped working, which are local numbers, but our main 800 number forwards to those numbers.

Calling the local provider was futile. The provider’s office was also experiencing the issue and could not receive calls.

Although we do have the 800 number on business cards, we quickly updated our website and Intercom docs to use a recently provisioned 800 number from one of the VOIP providers.

It took 2 days for the other lines to begin working again. This is the first POTS outage we have experienced in several years.

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#48

Post by luckylion »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #32

I have the same on Sendgrid, owned by Twilo. One day they just cut us off with no explanation, kneecapping our product. I raised two tickets, neither of which were answered. The next day, it all started working again. I’ve always been a big advocate for using 3rd party SaaS, but with the level of customer service I’m seeing lately, I’m starting to recommend avoiding it where possible.

That's 99% of why I'm generally trying to avoid SaaS. I always run into some bug or nuisance or there's some account trouble and unless you're spending insane amounts of money, I've found support to be severely lacking, often answering support tickets with canned responses without reading the issue, or not answering at all.

I'd rather spend 100 hours upfront to have something that I know and can maintain than using a service, running into trouble and spend 50 hours chasing the support around to see whether they'd fix it, or worse, rely on their system, have it fail or be banned, and then having to spend 100 hours building a replacement, often while things are exploding left and right.

Relying on SaaS feels incredibly fragile to me.

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#49

Post by probably_wrong »

morrbo wrote: post #39
work_for_x wrote: post #28

I work for Twilio and forwarded it internally. If you are 6 years with the company, you probably have an AE assigned to your company or have been in touch with any other human being along the way? UPDATE: Your account should be active now.

It's a bit shit that they had to jump through so many hoops, with HN being the only one that actually worked (after 7 hours) in order to get in touch. Serious kudos to you for helping them but I know a lot of people who wouldn't touch your company with a bargepole for these kind of reasons. Having to kick up a fuss on social media in order to get service, how very 2021..

> Having to kick up a fuss on social media in order to get service, how very 2021..

I'm kinda sad that the thread is about Twilio and not Google - my GMail account is blocked and I was hoping I could jump on the bandwagon.

Someone here should make a startup out of it.

Re: Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

#50

Post by duiker101 »

probably_wrong wrote: post #49
morrbo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit shit that they had to jump through so many hoops, with HN being the only one that actually worked (after 7 hours) in order to get in touch. Serious kudos to you for helping them but I know a lot of people who wouldn't touch your company with a bargepole for these kind of reasons. Having to kick up a fuss on social media in order to get service, how very 2021..

> Having to kick up a fuss on social media in order to get service, how very 2021.. I'm kinda sad that the thread is about Twilio and not Google - my GMail account is blocked and I was hoping I could jump on the bandwagon. Someone here should make a startup out of it.

Every so often a thread identical to this one appears for Google. The bottom line is always the same, don't use Google for anything that matters.
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