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Comment by bcooks | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the replies. Let me try to address a few of the things I have seen here. We haven't completed our investigation yet which will include details on the timeline, decisions made by our systems, our people, and our plans to address where we fell short. That said, I want to provide some information now rather than waiting for our full post-mortem analysis. A combination of factors, not just the usage patterns, led to the initial flag. We recognize and embrace our customers ability to spin up highly variable workloads, which would normally not lead to any issues. Clearly we messed up in this case.

Additionally, the steps taken in our response to the false positive did not follow our typical process. As part of our investigation, we are looking into our process and how we responded so we can improve upon this moving forward.

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With all due respect I think you’ve missed the point. The larger point from my perspective is that you denied your client the ability to move their data off your platform. This would be akin to someone breaking the terms of their lease and you confiscating all their belongings with the intent of burning them. You should provide some sort of grace period for users to move their data off your platform. For everyone else reading this this is should be a wake up call why you should never trust your data to a singular entity. Even if they have 99.9999% uptime you never know when they’ll decide to deny you access to your data.

Thank you for jumping in personally to clarify what happened.

As a business owner with much of our infrastructure depending on DigitalOcean, the incident is concerning. It affects the reputation of DO as well as its customers.

The demographics on Twitter and especially here on HN represents a sizable crowd with decision-making influence on DO's bottom line. I hope to see some effort being made to prevent situations like this in the future, and to regain the trust.

As a (so far) satisfied customer, it's great to hear that:

> A combination of factors, not just the usage patterns, led to the initial flag.

> We recognize and embrace our customers ability to spin up highly variable workloads, which would normally not lead to any issues.

> we are looking into our process and how we responded so we can improve upon this

I’ll be awaiting the post-mortem and, depending on that and the procedures proposed to stop this from happening again, will hold off moving everything I have from DO.

The real “mess up” here was the bit where you blocked the account with no reason given and no further communication - other than the one-liner your intern wrote for the email.

I’m expecting you to sit down with your legal team and rewrite your TOS to be more customer-focused and less robotic.

I wanted to provide you all with an update on the postmortem I promised on Friday. Our analysis has been completed. We will be sharing the full document soon and will publish a link in this thread for those wanting to read it. We promised Raisup a first look and we have provided the draft document to them this afternoon. Because some information in the document could be considered sensitive we wanted to give Raisup a chance to review the document before sharing with the public.

As a long term customer here is a small suggestion to make this fail-safe: by default do trust your customers, and just ask them first instead of shooting them down first.

Considering you have been marketing yourself as the platform for developer oriented cloud, you should be aware that surge provisioning can and will always be happening.

This is the right move. Sure, if an account has repeated violations after clear communications, then action must be taken.

But it doesn't make sense to shut it down before discussion!

I have always been a happy DO customer. So glad to see you step into this lions den and reply to the community.

Looking forward to the write up!

What do you recommend your clients to do if that kind of mistake happens to them? Is Twitter-shaming the only way out?

I know people say some legal arguments why they close you down and won't say anything, but this is the worst scenario ever. I'd be better off excused at something I didn't do than just ooops we can't tell you anything, your account has been shut down.

This is important. I hate how it had became standard for companies to screw their customers unless they are online-shamed.

The response email even read like a giant polite FUCK YOU (we locked your account, no further action required by you)

You bet I will have further action!

And it is after the shaming that you get an "I am sorry for this situation". Which sounds more like saying "I'm sorry we got caught".

My frustration is not with DO specifically, as they do exactly what every other company does.

But, what of the other thousands of people that got screwed and did not put it on twitter?

It is the equivalent of when you are in a restaurant and get screwed: It is the loudest person that complains more the one that gets the reward, while all the others silently swallow the injustice.

It's most likely due to the fact that the people who can act upon the process itself, not just follow the process inevitably see the issue and do truly want to help.

Getting your message into the right hands is what matters, not the platform it's on.

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