Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

As for what's wrong with the post, a ton. This was e-mailed to every single customer. For many people, myself included, this was their first notice that something was wrong with their finances. And it was the author's fault. The line you quoted was at the end of a very long post. The apology should have been right in the first paragraph. Instead in the first two lines he's complaining about how bad this is for him.

Then he makes a bunch of jokes. Then he explains why it was just tiny mistake. Don't feel bad if I missed the problem? I'm not the one being trusted with millions of dollars of your customer's money... [Edit: to me that bit reads as "See? You missed it too! Now why should I feel bad?"]

After all this, finally, he apologizes.

For me, this guy's mistake meant that I now had to worry about how I was going to pay bills/rent, and how I was going to eat. My situation was probably quite unique, but that didn't make it any less impactful for me.

To me the whole thing reads as "I just accidentally removed a few million dollars from my customers banks/credit lines - so now I'm gonna have a laugh with them!"

I can say with great confidence that I'm not immune to the mistakes that caused this to happen. But what I can say is that were I in his shoes, I'd lead with an apology, be very succinct about what happened, and finally list details as to how I'm going to make it better.

Edit: To his credit, if you read the next post he did a much, much better job there.

Edit 2: And also for what it's worth - I still use Dreamhost. Aside from this SNAFU they've ran an excellent service, and (again, except in this case) their customer service has been excellent in responding to any issues I've had. However now I always pay with credit rather than debit, and I don't store my card info.

As I indicated above Daniel, if you haven't shot a note to help@twilio.com indicating you're affected by the incident, please do so we can communicate directly when this $480 mistake is corrected.

Having built several automation systems that bill millions of dollars, I can say that it's quite challenging to build things that have no visible output, run by themselves and often sit there for years without being touched, while everything changes around them!

It's not sexy work, but when it goes wrong the shit really can hit the fan!

I was one of the customers affected. Luckily for me, my credit card automatically blocked the transaction after the 10th time I was auto-recharged, meaning I had a cap on how much I paid. I can totally understand the frustration of people discovering that they suddenly have 100's or even 1000's of dollars worth of charges to their credit card.

On the other hand, by the time I noticed that something strange was going on, Twilio's status page already said they were looking into it. I contacted their support right away, and they answered within 20 minutes, during what must be a customer support crisis.

And now RobSpectre is on HN giving very helpful answers.

So, no, it's not their finest work (as RobSpectre has said), but at least they're dealing with it quickly, and hopefully professionally as well. Let's let this play out before we jump up and down on a great company that we all love.