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AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

seuros.com

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Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#81

Post by packetslave »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #75
turtlebits wrote: post #69

"An AWS consultant who’d been covering my bills disappeared". I wouldn't be surprised if the payer filed a chargeback and then AWS went nuclear.

Just the absence of a credit card to pay overdue bills will make AWS go nuclear and the clock starts ticking. If they don’t “know you” financially you’ll need to jump through compliance questions before your new payment method is accepted. If you don’t verify the email verification mail within the 5 days I imagine you have to jump through more hoops, which this person didn’t do in time.

in AWS's defense, it's pretty easy to see the rationale for this. The amount of abuse they must deal with is staggering -- "spin up account, do evil stuff until they notice and nuke the account, repeat"

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#82

Post by electroly »

dylan604 wrote: post #53
pavel_lishin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. My backups - personal ones, not business - live in three places: 1. A hard drive in a fire safe. 2. An S3 bucket, mediated by Wasabi. 3. My friend's server that lives at his house half a continent away. It would be nice to have a fourth location that's a physical hard-drive that lives outside of my house, but close enough to drive to for pick-up, but it would mean either paying for a safety deposit box as you me…

> My friend's server that lives at his house half a continent away. I figure that if a disaster that takes out my house and someone across town at the same time, I probably won't be worrying about restoring data. Across continent would only be viable with a server like you mentioned essentially buddyCloud.

> I probably won't be worrying about restoring data

I urge you to reconsider this belief if you have the financial means. Life continues after natural disasters. I lived in a place that was devastated by a hurricane and many people's homes were destroyed. Those people still live and work today, and they still needed their files. They especially needed their insurance documents after the hurricane.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#83

Post by deadbabe »

rileymat2 wrote: post #78
deadbabe wrote: post #65

Digging deeper, it seems like the user just did it themselves. Didn’t properly verify their account. That’s the end. What do you expect?

> July 10: AWS sends verification request. 5-day deadline (including weekend). > July 14: Form expired. I contact support. Simple question: “What do you need from me?” > July 16-20: Four days of silence. Then: “We’re escalating to the appropriate > team.” > July 20: New form finally arrives. > July 21: I submit ID and utility bill (clear PDF). Response time: 10 hours. > July 22: AWS: “Document unreadable.” The same P…

July 10: Fill out the form.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#84

Post by cnst »

bookstore-romeo wrote: post #76

Something similar happened to a colleague of mine. He was in charge of his client’s website, which ran on servers from a company called Media Temple, which GoDaddy later acquired. A few years pass, and the account holder is completely out of the picture and not answering their email, and his authorization is needed to change the credit card which is set to expire soon. My colleague tries every support mechanism to re…

Visa® Account Updater for Merchants exists precisely for this reason:

https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau

https://developer.mastercard.com/product/automatic-billing-u...

https://stripe.com/resources/more/what-is-a-card-account-upd...

I'm super annoyed by any hosting or telco provider that has failed to implement it, I think it amounts to negligence, especially if they stop and completely erase your entire portfolio only a couple of days after payment failure, which some officially do.

I lost my Online.net Scaleway test servers this way, because they have failed to implement the updater. Of course, their support will always blame the customer.

BTW, these Account Updaters are also the reason why changing a card number will not prevent any recurring charges, either; it's by design.

I can confirm that Amazon Prime, Visible and 123-Reg have no issues with VAU and equivalents. Your monthly Amazon Prime in the US will continue getting billed to an expired credit card without any issues, for example. Same with Visible and even the annual renewals on 123-Reg. They all don't show the new card in the interface, and still DO issue warnings that the card is expired, yet, on the billing date, it all just bills as if nothing has happened.

T-Mobile US may lack support, and Callcentric, Hetzner and Online.net, don't seem to implement an Account Updater, either, not sure about OVH.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#85

Post by deadbabe »

vbezhenar wrote: post #66
deadbabe wrote: post #65

Digging deeper, it seems like the user just did it themselves. Didn’t properly verify their account. That’s the end. What do you expect?

For a customer, who paid 10 years, I'd expect a long enough grace period to allow customer to verify the account, while data would stay intact.

You can be a 10 year customer and one day a company decides they no longer want your business. I don’t see why people think being a long term customer entitles them to anything.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#86

Post by cnst »

andrewaylett wrote: post #80
cnst wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS is the apex cloud provider on the planet. This isnt about redundancy or best practices. Sorry, but it is absolutely and undeniably not! I don't think it's accurate to portray AWS as the underlying infrastructure of the internet on the planet at all. Speaking of the "planet", here's a sample statistics for .ru ccTLD on web hosting usage across the 1 million domain names in the zone — one of the top-10 ccTLD zone…

Russia requires a physical presence for services offered in-country, and also Amazon won't provision certificates for .ru domains, so it's not all that surprising they don't host a very high proportion of .ru.

That's just excuses that ignore the fact that AWS was never popular even before any of these restrictions came about.

Many of the providers on those lists are older than AWS, and/or have been in business for many years since before 2010, many for 20 years or more, long before the data sovereignty concerns went mainstream all around the world in the last 10 years.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#88

Post by cnst »

bookstore-romeo wrote: post #67

The Register had a piece on that story earlier this week: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/06/aws_wipes_ten_years/

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/06/aws_wipes_ten_years/

> An AWS spokesperson told The Register: "We always strive to work with customers to resolve account issues and provided advance warning of the potential account suspension. The account was suspended as part of AWS's standard security protocols for accounts that fail the required verification, and it is incorrect to claim this was because of a system error or accident."

Note that this deletion — without the supposedly standard 90d grace period — was NOT an error (up until the time it's been reinstated, apparently).

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#89

Post by oneplane »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #79
oneplane wrote: post #74

It's not sudden, the account owner disappeared and the account user (the one making all the noise) did not get ownership transferred. Is this a great situation? No. It's also not "I did everything right and boo hoo AWS did a boo boo". AWS is not your friend, but you also weren't the customer, that was the middleman you gave ownership to.

That does not appear to be an accurate representation of the story linked in the article[1]. There was no middle man. What are you referring to? [1] https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-deleted-my-10-year-account-w...

The article says so:

> AWS blamed the termination on a “third-party payer” issue. An AWS consultant who’d been covering my bills disappeared, citing losses from the FTX collapse. The arrangement had worked fine for almost a year—about $200/month for my testing infrastructure.

He essentially got screwed over by the consultant. Everything else is a side-effect but not material to the cause.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#90

Post by MobiusHorizons »

oneplane wrote: post #89
MobiusHorizons wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does not appear to be an accurate representation of the story linked in the article[1]. There was no middle man. What are you referring to? [1] https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-deleted-my-10-year-account-w...

The article says so: > AWS blamed the termination on a “third-party payer” issue. An AWS consultant who’d been covering my bills disappeared, citing losses from the FTX collapse. The arrangement had worked fine for almost a year—about $200/month for my testing infrastructure. He essentially got screwed over by the consultant. Everything else is a side-effect but not material to the cause.

Immediately after that it clearly states there was an alternate payment on file, and the termination was not handled like a payment issue.
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