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Comment by blargey | Hacker News Reader

The lede buried under that lede is that (according to an insider?) some AWS employee accidentally wiped everything immediately (contrary to typical practice in such situations of retaining data while things get sorted out), leading to a chain of brushing-off / covering-up percolating through whatever support chain the OP was talking to.

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That does seem to be a mistake on their part. And the comms we’re seeing look bad.

But the overall post and the double buried ledes make me question the degree to which we’re getting the whole story.

> And the comms we’re seeing look bad.

Right or wrong, those messages look like very standard AWS-speak for "this is your mistake, not ours".

I have no idea if that's a reasonable stance or not, but I _will_ say that AWS's internal culture contributes to this sort of bad press. If they would respond to their customers with even a trace of empathy and ownership, this post would likely never have been written.

If that's the case, then the mistake isn't that a support agent made the mistake, the mistake is that such a mistake was even possible.

I really love this game of debating the appropriate derivative of a mistake.

Maybe the mistake was inventing non-immutable data storage?

I find that story really hard to believe. In a company the size of Amazon, I can't imagine a rogue employee running a tool that can willy-nilly wipe out customers' data without several levels of manager approval.

Besides, what would be the potential benefit of such a hypothetical script? The author mentions "a bill under $200," so that's the upper limit on how much it costs AWS to keep the author's whole data. If I was working there and a coworker said "Hey I created a script that can save the company $200 by finding a defunct (but paying) customer and wiping out their data!", I'd have replied "What the fuck is wrong with you."

The idea of a rogue AWS team running a deletion script without oversight should sound ridiculous. At a company that size of AWS, you will expect guardrails, audits, approvals.

But here is the thing: no one from AWS has given me an official explanation. Not during the 20-day support hell, not after termination, not even when I asked directly: “Does my data still exist?” Just a slow drip of templated replies, evasions, and contradictions.

An AWS insider did reach out claiming it was an internal test gone wrong, triggered by a misused --dry flag and targeting At a company that size, you'd expect guardrails, audits, approvals low-activity accounts.

According to them, the team ran it without proper approval. Maybe it is true. Maybe they were trying to warn me. Maybe its a trap to get me to throw baseless accusations and discredit myself.

I'm not presenting that theory as fact. I don’t know what happened behind the wall.

What I do know is:

- My account was terminated without following AWS’s own 90-day retention policy

- I had a valid payment method on file

- Support stonewalled every direct question for 20 days

- No answers were provided, even post-mortem

> accidentally wiped everything immediately

There is no “wipe everything immediately” button.

Did you read the article?

> According to them, AWS MENA was running some kind of proof of concept on “dormant” and “low-activity” accounts. Multiple accounts were affected, not just mine.

If AWS has a 90-day closure policy, why was this account deleted so quickly?

"did you read the article" is the canonical example of what not to put in comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sure. But so is posting comments that clearly show one didn't read the article.

Or at least, if it isn't, it certainly should be.

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