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Comment by pkorzeniewski | Hacker News Reader

Azure support is probably the worst one I had ever deal with. When my account (and service itself) stopped working, I haven't received any email. When I tried to sign in, all I got was some generic error saying "There's something wrong with your account". My services of course were down and I couldn't do ANYTHING. I've contacted the support to learn that my account has been blocked (!) because there was some suspicious (!!) activity going on. What the... No, they couldn't tell me what exactly it was. I've exchanged emails back and forth with the support for several days to learn nothing new, my account and services were still disabled and I was more than pissed off. From that day I hate Azure and I advise anyone against using it, because such situation is absolutely unacceptable.

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Interesting, I actually just got one of those "suspicious activity" emails last week. But they just threatened to shut down my services, they haven't actually done it (yet).

It's still pretty obnoxious, because they basically said "there's something suspicious going on, we won't tell you what, but you better fix it or we'll shut you down." Gee, thanks. After a week of daily emails they finally responded with a network trace... that showed we're doing some outbound HTTP calls. That's it - they redacted everything except for the ports and the first two octets of the destination IP addresses. So very helpful, and certainly looks suspicious... </sarc>

Wait, what? Outbound HTTP is enough to get your account shut down? The hell! What if your web-app is utilising any API in the world, the vast majority are over HTTP/S utilising JSON or XML (and sometimes you need back end API access rather than client API access, like updating a product database).

Officially, no. Actually we've been doing a lot of outbound HTTP for years with no problems. But somebody (they won't tell me who) complained, and they "investigated" and decided that something we're doing looks malicious, but won't tell me exactly what. They just sent me an unhelpful network trace.

It's still possible there is something malicious going on, but they've been stunningly unhelpful in finding it. Mostly they've just asserted that there's a needle somewhere in our haystack, and we'd better go find it. They've been threatening to shut us down, but haven't actually done it.

I had a similar issue with azure where one of my drives just up and disappeared. Took days(!) to get it back. I'd never use Azure again.

There is probably a lot to complain about Azure, especially when it comes to proactive communication, dirty hacks and Windows weirdness. But their support was actually really nice to me...

I had a similar situation with DigitalOcean. Droplets were taken offline with no notification whatsoever, only answered after I submitted a ticket. This has happened to me twice.

Why were they taken offline? I had a droplet taken offline for security reasons once and they were very communicative and responsive.

Same reason. Did they send you a notification that it was going to happen? I did not, and only discovered it when the application being hosted on the droplet wasn't loading. Luckily it was just a personal tool.