I plan to update everyone on what happened as soon as I get some sleep first. I've been up since 7 am and it's 2 am now. The incident started at 7 pm.
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.
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?
That never, ever happened and I had to resort to a nicely worded note to a corporate VP on LinkedIn to resolve it. Even then, I'm pretty sure that "unpermitted gas line work" was the real driver in getting it resolved, since that's a big deal.
If the problem really gets kicked up in the media and left unaddressed, then eventually politicians will be forced to add some real regulation to force companies to do right by their customers.
That'd be expensive. So instead, ignore customers who can't kick up social attention and quickly resolve those that can before it gets legs. No one cares about the unknown, disconnected hordes of betrayed customers who lost their access for unknown reasons.
And I'm sure no company is covertly doing this to their tiny, would be competitors, killing the baby in the crib so to speak.
In fact, if you're an employee that actually cares about your customers, you'd do well to not internally raise these issues. Let the PR hit the executives harder and make them squirm.
I'm kinda sad that the thread is about Twilio and not Google - my GMail account is blocked and I was hoping I could jump on the bandwagon.
Someone here should make a startup out of it.
After I shamed them in twitter/github the issue got solved in 1 day.
The world is has become too wild tbh.
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.
For the love of christ will you please give us an 'email' verb in twiml ?
Or do you need sendgrid signups for some business metric and, therefore, this dead simple integration has to be avoided ?
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.
I understand what you're saying, but OP cannot alleviate their responsibility in this. You can't outsource your critical infrastructure to a third-party SAAS vendor and not have a plan for when things go tits up. OP didn't even know who to call. That's on them because they should have identified this as a risk long time ago.
But it doesn't so much seem like this is the case, having tried to reach out through several channels.
There are two issues that stand out:
1) The power asymmetry - some large SaaS vendors provide critical infrastructure to customers - like financial service providers to small business. There are tons of regulations in that industry because that.
2) The lack of recourse as standard practice in new high tech. If your bank magically stops you from collecting VISA at your corner store - there's generally a human you can speak to, pretty much right away. You may be put on hold. I get relatively immediate customer service from my bank as a tiny retail customer. The lack of provisions here by the industry is a systematic problem.
It was too late now. When things are on fire, you're in panic-mode now. The reality is that if Twilio had shitty support today, they had shitty support last week and 6 months ago (etc.). That should have been identified by OP as a risk to their business and rectified (either by forging a relationship with someone at Twilio so you can backchannel support request, or identifying your account manager and making sure they are responsive, or moving to another vendor with better support). Twilio is a critical supplier for OP's company. You can't just assume they care about your business as much as you care about your business.
>he power asymmetry - some large SaaS vendors provide critical infrastructure to customers
OK. So? There are lots of things you can plan for and not control. None of us are fully in control of our circumstances. We can't control how trillion-dollar companies behave. We can't control the weather. What you can control is your actions, your planning and ultimately your response to things you can't control.
For example, I peeked at OPs comment history and he mentioned that their support line was provided by them (they provide telephony services and therefore they dog-food their products) ... was that the right move though? Because if they are down (or Twilio is down), their customers will need to talk to someone and won't be able to reach them. Maybe it makes sense to have another provider handle their support line (or at least have a backup).
The point is that, sure, Twilio screwed up - fully agree with that. Maybe OP can recover some damages, and maybe not. Maybe it isn't worth chasing Twilio through courts for years and spending thousands of dollars. Regardless, ultimately it is OP that suffered the consequences of Twilio's screw up, so OP should prepare themselves for this in the future. And don't tell me that there's nothing OP could have done. That's bullshit.
UPDATE: Your account should be active now.