> In what world is automating the deletion of customer data a good idea?

The data destruction world :)

The world where employees care more about management satisfaction than customer satisfaction? And it's difficult to prove that bothering some customers here and there is impacting corporate revenue. Policies like this slip through the cracks.

Yes, it's digital oceans fault that people want to pay bargain basement prices and then wonder why they are getting bargain basement service.

Sorry, that doesn't excuse the purely bad idea of scripting deletion of data at the first sign of trouble.

It's not at the first sign of trouble, though. It's after ~15 email notifications over the course of over a month, and no contact back.

Both anecdotes mentioned timeframes of about 15 days after longer than a year of service.

The timeframe is 3 weeks until suspension, then another 2 weeks until deletion. At the time this user was affected, it was 3 weeks until suspension, then 3 days until deletion, but that period was raised to 2 weeks due to feedback that 3 days wasn't enough.

I'm not saying that excuses things, but it's far from "at the first sign of trouble".