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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]

#81

Post by throwaway2048 »

smhg wrote: post #31
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…

FWIW: you can turn off automatic recharge and ask for a different reminder limit. Not ideal, but at least it prevents crazy bills.

They still bill you no matter what, and if the bill is big enough they will sic collections on you.

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

#82

Post by kube-system »

dx034 wrote: post #61
blowski wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remove the tech-specific words from your comment, and you would probably find people saying the same thing throughout all of history.

Not sure if large car companies or clothes manufacturers (just two examples of large companies) were ever able to ignore legal rights of their customers. This has only become possible with digital services where companies refuse to acknowledge local laws and regulation.

If you want an example of ignoring local law, how about the East India Company? They formed their own army, took over part of India, and set up their own government.

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

#83

Post by chmod775 »

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…

> While this was going on, we got an email from their sales rep, congratulating us for increasing our spend by more than 8000% and wanted to have a chat. So I guess they do have the systems to monitor unusual patterns, they just turn a blind eye.

At this point we're entering criminal territory. Enriching yourself when you should reasonably know something criminal is occurring (like someone being defrauded), and helping the perpetrator by providing your service anyways, can make you a criminal yourself very fast.

As far as judges will be concerned, you're now a perp yourself.

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

#84

Post by vodkapump »

gtsop wrote: post #52
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.. Exactly. I'm locked out of a google account I have which links to a yt channel and a twitter account. The only truly viable option for me to get these back is work my way up the social media infulencing ladder and then complain how I lost access to my accounts. This is insane.

I had a similar issue as you, what ended up working for me was to contact the support for payment issues, and saying I had issues with paying for something.

Got in contact with a real human (i think..) in chat in under a minute, which helped me get it resolved via filling out like 4 different forms.

No idea if this would work for you though, but worth a try?

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

#85

Post by suvelx »

t0mas88 wrote: post #74
roblabla wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real fraud here seems to be the telephony industry's concept of a premium number. That there isn't an enforced standardized way to tell that a phone number will incur extra fees to contact is a failure of the industry. This shouldn't be a hard problem.

There is such a system, countries are supposed to report all premium number ranges to the ITU. The problem is that some countries/carriers don't actually do that and then still charge the high amount. If Twilio wanted to stand up for their customers they would refuse to pay for any premium number that's not in an ITU registered premium range. It will cause a few lawsuits with telecom carriers, but then probably ends…

Couldn't you not support SMS 2FA for noncompliant countries, and then check that it's not in an ITU registered premium range?

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

#86

Post by blowski »

kube-system wrote: post #82
dx034 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if large car companies or clothes manufacturers (just two examples of large companies) were ever able to ignore legal rights of their customers. This has only become possible with digital services where companies refuse to acknowledge local laws and regulation.

If you want an example of ignoring local law, how about the East India Company? They formed their own army, took over part of India, and set up their own government.

Exactly. If "putting innocent people in chains and enslaving them in a foreign country" doesn't count as ignoring people's legal rights, I'm not sure what does.

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

#87

Post by paul_f »

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.

It's an insane amount of engineering, but maybe one solution is to have two back end telephony SaaS. If one turns off, rely on the other until you get it fixed? Plivo, Mexmo?

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

#88

Post by hnarn »

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.

Please bring this up with someone that cares in your company: you ABSOLUTELY NEED a well working support organization with EFFICIENT escalation procedures.

Support cannot be an afterthought. If a long time customer has a critical incident like this, it needs to be caught and forwarded to the relevant people within a few hours at most. This type of PR fallout is unacceptable and completely avoidable. I, for one, will avoid Twilio just based on this story alone.

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

#89

Post by sshagent »

vodkapump wrote: post #84
gtsop wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having to kick up a fuss on social media in order to get service, how very 2021.. Exactly. I'm locked out of a google account I have which links to a yt channel and a twitter account. The only truly viable option for me to get these back is work my way up the social media infulencing ladder and then complain how I lost access to my accounts. This is insane.

I had a similar issue as you, what ended up working for me was to contact the support for payment issues, and saying I had issues with paying for something. Got in contact with a real human (i think..) in chat in under a minute, which helped me get it resolved via filling out like 4 different forms. No idea if this would work for you though, but worth a try?

I've had to use this kinda method for other things. No way to get a hold of a real person for support, try their new customer contact details. you can get they answer those real quick!

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

#90

Post by jariel »

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.

The customer should sue Twillio into oblivion, or at least try to.

Can you imagine running a business and having a critical aspect of it just entirely stopped without warning or recourse?

People could lose their jobs during a pandemic due to ineptitude and systematic arrogance?

If you factor these kinds of risks into business equations, it does not look good.

Depending on Tech is starting to feel like US Health Insurance: you're 'covered' until you're 'not' in which case you're going bankrupt.

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