Mistakes like this really suck, but I have no doubt that Twilio will make it right.
Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
61–70 of 123 posts
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#62This is one of the reasons I like to use my credit card over a debit card. Knowing that errors like this don't affect my mortgage payments makes me feel safer.
The web portal of my bank has a link ‘cancel’ next to every direct withdrawal which lets me cancel the charge immediately (at the cost of the people charging me, of course).
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#63Rob 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…
Rob, best of luck to you and the Twilio team while fixing and recovering from this incident.
We've been with Twilio for years and have received excellent service. Billing issues are always serious, but its nothing compared to a call routing issue, and when it comes to call routing Twilio has been flawless. I'd much rather call my bank and discuss an overdraft fee then call a client and explain why their calls were not routed properly.
In the years we've been with Twilio, we have not experienced any significant downtime. Compare that to one of their main competitors that experienced eight consecutive hours of downtime during business hours earlier this year, and I'm confident we're in good hands.
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#64Rob 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…
Rob, best of luck to you and the Twilio team while fixing and recovering from this incident. We've been with Twilio for years and have received excellent service. Billing issues are always serious, but its nothing compared to a call routing issue, and when it comes to call routing Twilio has been flawless. I'd much rather call my bank and discuss an overdraft fee then call a client and explain why their calls were no…
Thank you very much for that.
We came up way short for you this morning - committed to making it right.
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#65Rob 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…
[deleted]
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#66Apologies for nit-picking at punctuation, but occasionally it matters :-) "Twilio is over-billing ..." = Twilio is charging more than they should. "Twillio is over billing ..." = Twilio has given up on billing. It's so over. Just my personal bugbear - but sometimes it's worth getting this sort of thing correct. Apologies if this is just a US/UK difference, also (I'm in the UK).
Since we're already nitpicking, "overbilling" (without the hyphen) is probably better.
https://www.google.com/search?q="overbilling" vs. https://www.google.com/search?q="over-billing"
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#67Apologies for nit-picking at punctuation, but occasionally it matters :-) "Twilio is over-billing ..." = Twilio is charging more than they should. "Twillio is over billing ..." = Twilio has given up on billing. It's so over. Just my personal bugbear - but sometimes it's worth getting this sort of thing correct. Apologies if this is just a US/UK difference, also (I'm in the UK).
I'm from the US and I also originally thought the headline was saying something along the lines of "Trilio [has ended the practice of] billing and suspending accounts". When I clicked on the article I realized that they were "over-billing" instead of "over billing".
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#68Apologies for nit-picking at punctuation, but occasionally it matters :-) "Twilio is over-billing ..." = Twilio is charging more than they should. "Twillio is over billing ..." = Twilio has given up on billing. It's so over. Just my personal bugbear - but sometimes it's worth getting this sort of thing correct. Apologies if this is just a US/UK difference, also (I'm in the UK).
Not a single person was confused by this, including me, a British dude sitting in the middle of London.
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#69For 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…
This is, interestingly, a good reason to use a credit card (and pay it off in full every month) rather than a debit card. With a credit card, you at least have a layer of insulation between your bank account and an erroneous charge.
Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 shockin…
See my other comment for thoughts on the e-mail/post (sibling to yours).
On the banks... "Overdraft protection" is probably the single most disingenuous thing the banks have done to low-income individuals. It's such a "squeeze 'em when they're down" tactic. I had all kinds of financial problems in college, mostly my own doing, but they were sooo complicated by this... service. Suddenly because of one mistake, 10 small transactions turns into an additional $320 expense. Three days later you get 10 little envelopes in the mail. And then the dread. "Shit, I did it again. Now what am I gonna do?"
To the best of my knowledge, SunTrust wouldn't let you opt out prior to the CARD act. Or, if they did, none of their customer service reps or bank managers notified me of the possibility.
Thankfully I manage my finances better now. And thankfully the CARD act makes overdraft protection opt-in (although for a lot of banks this is just another clause in the phonebook-sized account agreement you sign), and there are now a few checking accounts (ING Direct, Ally bank) that treat payment of transactions that cause overdraft like what it is - a line of credit.