There's lessons here for everyone! If you are a SaaS provider, please keep offsite backups and protect them sufficiently. Don't allow a common control panel to manage your production data AND your backup data. In my backup strategy I use a combination of onsite and offsite backups. The onsite is really just a convenience thing where you can easily access your data quickly. The offsite backups are there in case anything happens at the production location, either to your live data or to the live data and the backups.
The lesson for customers is to never trust anyone when it comes to backups. Don't assume that a provider's claim about their "rock solid" or "proven" backups means anything. Pretend they don't have a backup.