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Comment by exwiki | Hacker News Reader

Why don't they refund every paid customer who was impacted? Why do they rely on the customer to self report the issue for a refund?

For example GCS had 96% packet loss in us-west. So doesn't it make sense to refund every customer who had any API call to a GCS bucket on us-west during the outage?

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Cynical view: By making people jump through hoops to make the request, a lot of people will not bother.

Assuming they only refund the service costs for the hours of outage, only the largest of customers will be owed a refund that is greater than the cost of an employee chasing compiling the information requested.

For sake of argument, if you have a monthly bill of 10k (a reasonably sized operation), a 1 day outage will result in a refund of around $300, not a lot of money.

The real loss for a business this ^ size is lost business from a day long outage. Getting a refund to cover the hosting costs is peanuts.

for your example, one day would be about 3% of downtime. My understanding of their sla, for the services ive checked with an sla, a 3% downtime is a 25% credit for the month's total, or $2500, assuming its all sla spend.

In this outage's case you might be able to argue for a 10% credit on affected services for the month, figuring 3.5 hours down is 99.6% uptime.

but i still agree, it cost us way more in developer time and anxiety than our infra costs, and could have been even worse revenue impacting if we had gcp in that flow

Good point, I stand corrected/educated.

From GCP's top level SLA:

https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla

99.00% - < 99.99% - 10% off your monthly spend 95.00% - < 99.00% - 25% off your monthly spend < 95.00% - 50% off your monthly spend

<95%... that's catastrophically bad.

> For sake of argument, if you have a monthly bill of 10k (a reasonably sized operation), a 1 day outage will result in a refund of around $300, not a lot of money.

Probably literally not worth your engineer's time to fill in the form for the refund.

They write the need for the customer to request it into the SLA, probably on the theory that a lot of customers won’t, which saves them money.

Not directly GCS-related, but there was a big Youtube TV outage during the World Cup of last year (I think it was during semi-finals?). Google did apologize, but they only offered a free week of Youtube TV, which they implemented by charging me a week later than usual. I didn't feel compensated at all (it was a pretty important game that I missed!)

Wow, what a dick move...

What would you prefer they did instead?

Honestly, just the apology would be better. I felt I was being tricked. I end up paying each month anyway; it changed nothing for me.

Probably because it seems to be in the SLA that the customer must notify Google? https://cloud.google.com/storage/sla

> "[Customer Must Request Financial Credit] In order to receive any of the Financial Credits described above, Customer must notify Google technical support within thirty days from the time Customer becomes eligible to receive a Financial Credit. Failure to comply with this requirement will forfeit Customer’s right to receive a Financial Credit."

So the answer to why it is this way, is because they wrote it down this way..? I think the real question was why this decision was made, not whether they announced this.

I agree, but it’s pretty standard SLA verbiage (from the telco/bandwith provider days) to require the customer to request/register the SLA violation to benefit.

> I agree, but it’s pretty standard SLA verbiage (from the telco/bandwith provider days) to require the customer to request/register the SLA violation to benefit.

FiOS has proactively given me per-day refunds of service without notification on my part. Weird to me that Verizon acts better than Google in this case.

Interesting, which kind of fios account? (residential/SMB/data center interconnect) That’s ideally how it should be!

Residential.

It’s easier to determine “this line was down thus everyone along the line was also down” than what Google is facing.

Google knows the affected regions and probably has very fine grained data around this. I mean, they can even tell you metrics about your instances, they don't have monitoring on their own infrastructure to determine impact radius?

It’s a vastly complex problem. What servers were impacted? For what percentage of the overall outage was each server impacted? During that time, was the server offline or simply slower than usual?

And the part that even Google can’t know, even if they somehow can assemble all of the above: did it matter? Not all servers are created equal.

Small wonder they’re letting customers drive their own reimbursement process.

My question is if you had to pay for Google AdWords and your site was inaccessible due to GCloud outage, do you have recourse on SLA for paid clicks? Or is that money paid to Google AdWords lost?

In the same boat.

The icing on the cake was they disapproved one of the ads due to the destination URL not loading.. which was in itself surprising, because everything outside of the affected region was running fine.

Why do retailers use mail-in rebates instead of just lowering the price?

It’s probably more than just “some buyers will forget or not bother to redeem the rebate.” There are other reasons, like price discrimination.

That's for price discrimination. This is more like the usual case of don't pay if you don't have to, though in Google's case it could well be that they don't care.

Microsoft refunded after their latest outage in South Central. Google might announce a refund later, though I did read on here that some of their outage was not covered by their SLA.

Same reason mail-in rebates used to be a huge thing on physical products.

They're well aware that ~50% won't bother, so that $10 discount per unit effectively becomes a $5 discount.

Customer having to request for refund has been documented in their SLA, e.g. https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla

Having said that, if Google wants to delight customers, they should give a free tier bonus to all customers for a certain period, but such a thing cannot be fair to everyone.

>Having said that, if Google wants to delight customers

It'd never happen, "delight" is an Apple principle.

You get what you pay for.

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