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Comment by seo-speedwagon | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been curious how long you can get away with not paying your AWS bill before they start shutting your stuff off. Obviously it matters how big a customer you are, and I imagine AWS will put up with quite a bit in the hopes of having that contract honored before burning that bridge entirely.

What kinds of knobs does AWS have, I wonder? Not allowing new resources to get allocated? Eventually start draining existing resources? I imagine for stateful stuff like DB tables and EBS volumes they might keep them around but inaccessible to Twitter until they pay their bill.

I of course am a responsible individual with a flawless credit score so I have no experience with such things myself

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Amazon wants Twitter to spend according to contract; refusing service would run counter that. When there is a contract, there are hefty legal switches one can throw. No need to fiddle with resource knobs.

That's a very naive view. At the customer size of Twitter, it's more like the old adage. If you owe the bank $1MM it's your problem, but if you own the bank $100MM it's their problem.

Yes and when refusing service Amazon would not be fulfilling their part of the contract. Negotiations would be harder for them in that case.

Cutting service is the very last cudgel to come out for large contracts. And only when counterparty's insolvency is looming. Which may or may not be the case for Twitter.

If Amazon concluded Twitter's insolvency was near it would certainly negotiate on the contract. Before cutting service. Which is why it's interesting to watch Amazon's reaction here.

It’s funny to think about AWS doing hardball arm twisting stuff like “we moved all your S3 objects into Glacier Deep Storage, we’ll be happy to help you retrieve them once we straighten out this little problem with your bill”

But I think what you’re saying seems more likely

_Presumably_ amazon believes that twitter has sufficient assets that a court order can leave them whole. They have a contract with twitter, so twitter can't simply not pay indefinitely it's just a matter of when amazon decides that twitter's debt to them exceeds their assets, and their revenue won't make up for it.

This is a good point. It makes it seem a lot more binary, actually. Either I think I can get my money with enough legal work, so I keep serving them, or I don’t think I’ll be made whole so they’re fired as a customer and their assets get liquidated (modulo anything that is paid up like reserved assets that are paid in full).

Again my enviable FICO score and decades of responsible borrowing mean I’m speculating quite a bit here

I can't speak to AWS but in my experience with an expired credit card and a few dollars owed on an otherwise unused account Azure will permanently destroy your data and resources after about 5 months.

That's generous. I had an OVH VPS that got shut down and wiped all within about a month of missing a payment. And the shutdown notice never went to my regular email, just to "ovh email" notifications dashboard which I almost never visit.

For a company as large and popular as Twitter, turning off their servers will be a CEO-level decision at AWS. And the conclusion will likely be that there's very little benefit in doing so. You're going to get your money from them one way or another.

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