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Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

The actual story states that something unique in the customer's storage was causing an error on Apple's side, yielding downtime.

I'm not remotely blaming the customer, but what a nothing-burger this submission is: Apple didn't "shut down" his iCloud account, they met an edge in their implementation that they had to remediate. Obviously customer support should be better and convey more information, but I picture a bunch of engineers frantically trying to deal with something they didn't plan for (cue replies claiming that the perfect programmers of HN would never have such an edge, how is it possible, etc) and things getting lost in translation.

I do find the story interesting in that he immediately filed a complaint with the BBB. That seems...risky. It's unfortunate that big corps can do this, but I wouldn't want to be perceived as a "problem" customer doing things like that when big Corps control your online existence.

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> > I'm not remotely blaming the customer, but what a nothing-burger this submission is: Apple didn't "shut down" his iCloud account, they met an edge in their implementation that they had to remediate.

Apple acknowledged they were not providing this person with the product the person was paying for, yet (presumably), no refund was offered.

> I do find the story interesting in that he immediately filed a complaint with the BBB. That seems...risky.

Why do people think BBB matters? I’ve had customers at my businesses threaten to go to the BBB and it affects business not one bit.

I guess. Though I've never seen HN so invested in someone getting a $1.65 refund. Maybe we can setup a GoFundMe or something.

As to the BBB, personally I find it to be a worse-than-useless corrupt joke. But running to them, forcing Apple to respond, is the kind of thing that just doesn't have a lot of pull against large companies.

Why do people think BBB matters?

It's a generational thing - BBB tends to be respected by people who reached maturity before the internet became big. There was no easy way to complain or vent about business back then, so the BBB actually had clout... With businesses that actually paid to be a member... So, still not that useful, even then.

The BBB never mattered, even if my fellow olde pharts thought it mattered. Note the part where you state that "businesses...paid". What's that phrase folks on HN throw around way too much about who pays, and who the real customer is? BBB was the /dev/null for customer complaints that the businesses paid to cause customers to think they had effective complaint channel.

Source: oldster from back when folks naively thought a complaint to the BBB made any difference, and a former owner of a business that was a member of the BBB.

We had bugs at work, but I assure you we do not take days to fix critical issues like a customer can't login and use the stuff he is paying us for. We would never show you a TOS and say to you "sucker you clicked accept, please wait until someone has the time to fix this minor issue for us but important for you).

In cases where an issue inconvenienced a customer I know we were compensating them with stuff(like upgrades or discounts).

How much does each customer pay you every month?

I am just a dev but support has direct access to me, when a customer has a problem that support can't handle the issue is forwarded to me and most of the time I fix the issue.

A small company really needs to try to keep each customer. In the past I worked on even smaller company I was doing support and dev , this forced me to automate support related tasks like gathering reports with detailed information, then as dev I could get user reports and fixed. This would not have worked if the application would have been fulled of bugs but it was done in a managed language so there were few bugs and some of them were not the app but the platform.

> I wouldn't want to be perceived as a "problem" customer doing things like that when big Corps control your online existence.

Being a PITA on social media tends to be the only way to reach someone authorized and competent to actually resolve issues.

Sure, try to resolve it through normal support channels first, but if you're given the run-around, you want to be a "problem customer". The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

I think it is far from a "nothing-burger" but a strong warning not to depend on Apple for business critical cloud sevices because they don't care strongly about or take any responsibility for customer downtime.

Issues happen, but it is the response that companies give you that tells you how much they value your business amd how much you should trust them with critical infrastructure.

If you're using iCloud, a consumer service, for business critical operations, you're doing business critical very wrong.

What makes iCloud a consumer service but iPhones not a consumer product in the same way?

Unless they are, in which case we should get out the megaphones and warn all businesses that those expensive phones they're buying can't be relied upon.

That you can use any one of Box, Google Drive or OneDrive, all of which have enterprise tiers and features for your files answers that question. In term of mail or messaging, Google Workspace and/or Microsoft 365, you knowBoth of which are backed by SLAs. Look at the consumer version, both of which offer paid consumer versions and compare the SLAs...

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