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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

#71

Post by pjmlp »

peterjancelis wrote: post #36
pjmlp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone once putted, "the software industry is like buying shoes that explode when you try them on".

We only get away with things like outsourcing, low quality work full of bugs, side jumpers into the industry, weekend developers, because no one is held accountable for software bugs and their consequences.

The only place people seem to care is when people life's are at risk, and even then we know how Therac-25 went out.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#72

Post by 300bps »

free652 wrote: post #15
robobrobro wrote: post #6

Wow. Seriously? Learn to code.

Well actually learn to write test cases and review code. Though even with that it's feasible to miss a bug.

Especially when the bug very feasibly might not be in your system.

In this case, Twilio is obviously calling out to a billing provider of some sort. I've run into situations myself where the billing provider returns a status message equivalent to "failure" when it actually was successful. In that case, many billing systems will try again thereby double-billing or worse.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#73

Post by benjamincburns »

RobSpectre wrote: post #64
WillieBKevin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seconding Willie's comments. I'm not your customer today, but seeing how y'all are handling this would make me feel confident to use Twilio should the need arise.

When you get some time (I'm sure you have none right now), read some of the Dreamhost discussion below. You folks appear to be doing an excellent job responding to this.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#74

Post by shakes »

I've been using Twilio for over 3 years now and haven't experienced any significant downtime or service issues. Their support has always been amazing. Obviously this situation sucks but if there's any company I'd trust to make it right it's Twilio.

From a developer point of view, we all have bugs. I remember the first time one of my bugs impacted customers and it was awful. If there's any community that should be understanding that things like this happen in the tech world, it should be us.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#75

Post by CaptainZapp »

btucker wrote: post #5

I'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.

Well, don't rule bad software glitches in medical devices out so fast. As a matter of fact: they can kill:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#76

Post by lftl »

nkozyra wrote: post #26
freehunter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or if it's on a credit card and you hit your credit limit and they keep trying to charge. How do you reimburse for a drop in credit rating?

This is unlikely to happen given most cards report monthly with a 30-day delay. Assuming you're able to contest the charges there would be no effect on your rating. Debit/bank users are definitely the most susceptible.

Additionally as far as I know there is no credit rating penalty for repeated attempted charges above your limit. That sort of information isn't even on any report I've ever seen. The increased balance may impact your credit score, but as you've noted it's unlikely this would make it onto your credit report unless Twilio is rather slow to resolve the issue.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#77

Post by benjamincburns »

superuser2 wrote: post #69
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…

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.

Indeed. I have a much better system in place now.

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#78

Post by phaemon »

benjamincburns wrote: post #51
phaemon wrote: post #39

Earlier 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…

The bank was SunTrust. They were very scummy. 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'…

Fair enough. It's probably a bad first contact on the issue. I read it as him fully accepting responsibility for the error and explaining exactly what had happened.

But then, it's easy enough for me to view it in a generous light, when it had no personal effect on me. I would no doubt have felt very different had it been my account that was wiped out!

Oh, and yeah banks suck, especially when you're poor. Been there...

Re: Twilio is erroneously over-billing and suspending accounts

#80

Post by aculver »

eksith wrote: post #30

This sort of thing has happened before to another company, but that was a case of human error compounded by the fact that there were no software safeguards in place. http://dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2008/01/15/um-whoops/ At the very least, it would be wise for any company to implement billing features that will under bill rather than overbill. Under billing at least gives you the option of notifying users later (or yo…

Here's a choice piece of code we have in production along the lines of what you suggest:

    if prorated_amount > (cost_per_month * 2)
      raise "critical! we were about to prorate-charge someone #{prorated_amount}"
    end
It's never been triggered, but this is probably the only place in our system where we're actually responsible for an exact amount that ends up on an invoice, so having a reasonable upper limit seems like a no-brainer.
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