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Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

status.twilio.com

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Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#41

Post by citricsquid »

lysol wrote: post #14

Haha, the one time in my life having an outdated credit card on file paid off.

As uptown said, providing valid credit card information creates an authorisation for a merchant to charge to you, if your card expires after that authorisation has already been created you can still be charged and that charge will still be approved by your credit card provider. This is a common problem for people who take out short term loans and then think they can cancel their card to escape being emptied out when due day comes.

Cancelling a card (or letting it expire) prevents new authorisations, it does not cancel previous authorisations.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#42

Post by RobSpectre »

dazbradbury wrote: post #3

We've been charged about 10k and going up... Looks like their auto-recharge balance test keeps returning 0 or less than 0, it charges your card, and loop. EDIT: Looks like they're doing something - the UI at least now displays $500, rather than $10k before. The only real confidence I'll get is when I can see todays account transactions from the bank.

We are actively working on the incident and have identified the accounts affected.

There will be account balance changes in the Dashboard UI as we address the erroneous billing.

If you haven't already, please send us an email to help@twilio.com so we can keep you directly updated on our recovery work.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#43

Post by eksith »

phaemon wrote: post #39
benjamincburns wrote: post #29

For 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…

I was about to say this too. There was a lot of vitriol on the comments as well, but all of them follow the frustration of being overdrawn. But I agree, if the bank or card company doesn't take this as a genuine error and erase the record, then it's a pretty lousy institution.

Maybe he could have worded it differently and shown less irreverence, but that may be a byproduct of the stress as well. It's a pretty shocking thing too and they're human after all.

My current web host uses them as a registrar for some years and they've been pretty happy with DH services.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#44

Post by jusben1369 »

phaemon wrote: post #39
benjamincburns wrote: post #29

For 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…

That was a pretty terrible post. Very self centered. Just lots of me me/I's I's in the first few paragraphs I read. Pretty tone deaf to the real issue which would be customers like the above being impacted.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#45

Post by RobSpectre »

jerguismi wrote: post #10
dazbradbury wrote: post #3

We've been charged about 10k and going up... Looks like their auto-recharge balance test keeps returning 0 or less than 0, it charges your card, and loop. EDIT: Looks like they're doing something - the UI at least now displays $500, rather than $10k before. The only real confidence I'll get is when I can see todays account transactions from the bank.

I had like $240 billed, when there was nothing used... fuck.

I think that reaction is entirely appropriate in this case.

We just unsuspended the accounts affected by this incident and are currently working on the balances.

If you haven't already, please send an email to help@twilio.com indicating you are affected by the incident so we can communicate directly as we correct these erroneous charges.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#47

Post by RobSpectre »

SCDaniel wrote: post #25
dazbradbury wrote: post #3

We've been charged about 10k and going up... Looks like their auto-recharge balance test keeps returning 0 or less than 0, it charges your card, and loop. EDIT: Looks like they're doing something - the UI at least now displays $500, rather than $10k before. The only real confidence I'll get is when I can see todays account transactions from the bank.

Dear god I hope the $500 in shows in my UI isn't just a ruse to stop me worrying before knowing it's actually in the XXXX/X price range!

The account balance in your Dashboard UI will have some changes as we continue our recovery work.

If you haven't already, please send an email to help@twilio.com so we can let you know directly the resolution for this billing error.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#48

Post by RobSpectre »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #12

This is bad. It'll badly affect people with low bank balances and high overdraft charges - it'll be interesting to see how Twilio reimburses people for charges banks levy on customers.

I agree - this is not our best work.

We'll have more on what caused this incident and what we're going to do to make it right later today.

OP link directs to the board with our up-to-the-minute status on resolving this incident.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#49

Post by jusben1369 »

uptown wrote: post #23
lysol wrote: post #14

Haha, 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.

What may be happening there is that Netflix is connected to services provided by the card companies to stop interruptions to recurring billing for reasons like this. Long story short if Netflix receives an error code from the payment gateway that says something like "Card expired/Card changed" it'll make a call out to this service with the old card data. That'll do a look up and return the new data to Netflix who then updates their records and charges away happily.
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