Twitter ‘smytes’ customers
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I'm pretty accustomed to executives making dreadful decisions without the approval/acceptance of other stakeholders within said person's firm. I'd rather know who made this error and not interact with that specific person's department rather than stop doing business (e.g. large ad-buys) with Twitter as a whole.
I don't want this to be a witch-hunt so much as I want the person to just come forward and own the decision, because unless they have an exceptionally good reason for it, it comes off as absurdly high-risk to both Twitter-the-business as well as to all the clients who've likely written serious penalties into their contracts for events like this, which again brings that business risk back full-circle to... Twitter.
Twitter could have stepped in and halted things, but that would have required Smyte to have acknowledged breaching the contract and forfeiting $$.
This is all guess of what seems to me more likely than any Twitter exec pulling any triggers like this. Of course, it's still a screwup by Twitter to have not been tuned in and aware that fingers would point to them.
But that's a very different kind of mistake than "I have an idea, let's hit the power button at 6:30. Team: you have 30 minutes to let all our customers know."
But you're actually right -- if the acquisition hasn't closed yet, they're independent and independently responsible.
My hunch as an outsider is that Smyte wasn't GDPR compliant. Their leadership knew it, they knew they couldn't easily become so (for instance, they may have been using Kafka in a way where compaction wouldn't help, and didn't want to build an encryption-based monstrosity [0]), realized that they wouldn't increase in value as a business due to that risk, took an acquihire for cheap in order to give their employees a decent landing and give a return to their investors, and couldn't tell anyone about these plans in advance because it might jeopardize the transaction.
EDIT: They were indeed using Kafka per [1], and due to the strict latency requirements on their business, that may have ruled out the type of encryption scheme in [0].
[0] https://danlebrero.com/2018/04/11/kafka-gdpr-event-sourcing/
It could also hamper their ability to make further acquisitions. In future, a startup being linked with a possible Twitter acquisition is going to cause its customers to panic and start moving elsewhere. That'll make startups more reluctant to engage, and may turn some off entirely, if they're not comfortable with the prospect of totally screwing over the customers who've supported them during their early stages.
But that doesn't come with any actual guarantees does it?
Half an hour of warning, to screw over all of these?
They broke npm's user sign-ups, and publishing of packages, with half an hour of warning.
I can't imagine the havoc over at Zendesk either.
That is not 'winding down'. That's ghosting.
I wonder how much Twitter is going to pay on top of the acquisition cost of what I can only imagine constitutes breach of contract with all of these companies. (If it doesn't, why even bother having a contract with a duration?)
Acquirers usually prefer asset deals for this reason as it allows them to leave unpleasant liabilities behind. There's generally some sort of shell left that goes through wind down but it has few/no assets attached. In this case you can try to go after the original investors including founders or other shareholders (the IRS may do this if there tax issues) but since there's nobody home you are less likely to get much out of a favorable judgement.
Apparently, they were a dominant player in this space, such that its shutdown impacted such a wide array of significant-sized companies, from ZenDesk to TaskRabbit to Meetup. Even more surprising is that they were part of YC (W15), and yet from what I can tell, have only had one significant mention on HN from 3 years ago (65 upvotes, 11 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9758464
I would've guessed that Smyte would've been the kind of Silicon Valley business that was made for media hype (what with all the attention/criticism given to fake news and Google/FB/Twitter moderation). Then again, it does seem that content moderation -- important as it may be -- isn't a field as sexy as AI/deep-learning and other forms of automation.
In the former, you can take the assets (including employee contracts) without the liabilities.
There's actually a reasonable quora answer (for once) on this, saving me from writing it up for you :)
https://www.quora.com/What-happens-to-legal-contracts-financ...
I guess the liability is covered by the usual "no liability outside provision of the service" clause - so you can't claim that you were damaged by their lack of service. But I can see a lawyer making a convincing case that the liability should rest with Smyte. IANAL, obviously, but it seems like the sort of thing they love to fight about ;)
gets popcorn this one will be interesting...
There might be a carveout for consequential damages (which would be huge here), but this seems like it will trigger a number of sizable lawsuits against Smyte's new owner.
If nothing than just getting a pound of flesh from twitter.
Astoundingly unprofessional.
So... what was the Service Level Agreement? and the Terms Of Service?
People get all hyped by -aaS stuff, but services do go down, and if you aren't the one controlling when and how they will go up, then you better have a contract with the Service Provider on some terms you like.
Even then, prepare for when they go down, because they will sooner or later, for shorter or longer periods of time.
I find it silly to rely on some service, any external service, so much that if it goes down it would cause a prod outage.
This is always trotted out and it's, by this point, a completely content-free thing to say. Short of removing yourself from the economy and society in general to live off potatoes grown in your own dung, you're going to rely on some external services and the fact that, for the most part, the parties you do business with will behave responsibly. When they behave very irresponsibly, unpleasant things happen and people quite reasonably complain.
Your local restaurant going out of business is no reason for you to starve to death, you just go to another one, or to a grocery store, or indeed grow your own food if you're in some post-apocalyptic world or got no money... but somehow a service provider going out of business is reason enough for your production to stop? No, just no.
Only if you pretend there are no companies that do in fact responsibly nail this stuff down. There's plenty. Your argument seems to be that nobody does it because it's hard.
There are pretty solid SLA's for that. We provide some services as kind-of-saas but the SLAs are watertight.
Usually in those kind of sla's you can't sell the company (or move assets) without guarantee of delivery of the contract. In some cases they (the contract holders) even own you if you screw up and go under.
I'm curious; what would you have these companies do in such a scenario? If 100% uptime is impossible then what you seem to be suggesting is that people should never use third party services or if they do use them they must not be in a critical path.
Are you suggesting everyone should do everything in house?
If you have to use non-free software, buy software, not services.
If you have to buy services, always have a well-tested fallback path for when that service is not available.
What I'm suggesting is that people should use external services for their lower costs, better performance, or extra features, not to 100% depend on any of them.
There is a popular C# package called Polly that has all sorts of fault tolerant strategies.
https://github.com/App-vNext/Polly/wiki/Transient-fault-hand...
In this case, use a Fallback strategy that responds to an API failure with some type of generic success response.
I postulate more than few roles were halted at that time.
I'm calling it now: B2B startups will soon have to sign poison pill contracts that specifically detail what happens if they're bought out. This might ruin the "buy them for their people and discard the business" method of hiring - or at least it will if the customers have any sense.
I had assumed Twitter was going to be paying out a bunch of breach-of-contract penalties, because this is basically what contracts are for. Is there a standard way around this?
Also I wonder how many customers are staying quiet, because "our fraud protection provider just stopped working" isn't something they want to reveal.
(Disclaimer: I work for a smyte competitor).
Seems unrealistic especially since the majority of times when these services go down it's likely just a short time so they probably have abstracted around them to avoid unexpected failure and just have routine, down time failures.
Every tech company big enough probably sees the same writing on the wall the rest of us do that it's time to press their advantages. That means shutting everyone else out.
We probably all have mission-critical parts of our infrastructure that aren't core competencies. We probably can't afford for them to go away tomorrow, but now it's time to expect and plan for it.
Get ready to ride the consolidation wave.
The goodwill itself has to be worth a TINY bit.
Companies like Twitter whose core business is to shit on their users and customers don’t care about goodwill.
Imagine if Google decided that tomorrow at 6AM PT they were pulling the plug on YouTube embedding, or GMail / GDrive integrations. The court's going to say, "They put in the contract that they can change the terms of service at any time, and they're not liable for outages or lack of service. And you signed it. Sucks for you."
Then again, I'm just anti-corp in general and this gives me better reason to avoid Twitter.
This will be how it turns out for a few big players with deep enough pockets. Surely though this is hurting somebody's business that can't afford the lawsuit -- potentially to the point of putting them out of business. That's good for Twitter (and especially Twitter, as precarious as they are).
We've all joked for years about how FAANG pay their engineers so much mostly to keep other companies from being able to hire great engineers. We've gotten the big three slapped for colluding against their employees on wages. Why do you think they would engage in some anti-competitive business practices and not others?
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/google-will-pull-its-qpx-e...
I'm not sure how good apple is, but when they buy software available on Windows that version usually gets killed. (See Logic music production, killed 3 months after purchasing, but presumably the old installs still worked.).
Even Halo was demoed on mac before MS bought it (The mac version never came out)
I bet their term of services mentioned that they can cease operations on no notice.
No company lawyer I know would willingly put their signature on such a contract unless the other side is using a free tier. If someone actually signed 3 year contract with such a clause, congrats, you managed to throw a lot of money into a black hole.
1) If your business depends on Internet access you shouldn’t pay for a residential plan. You need an SLA.
2) Natural disasters happen. Not having emergency drinking water is very naïve.
3) If your business depends on electricity you should also get business rate with SLA and maybe have a backup generator or two. Heck, I have a UPS just to not lose the 15 minutes of work that’s not automatically backed up.
4) Yes, get a weapon (preferably a gun) and at least know enough first-aid to be able to stop a bleeding. Keep an aspirin on hand in case of a heart attack. Know your emergency exits and evacuation plan. Make sure you have the mindset to leave all your possessions behind in a burning inferno.
All of the above used to be common sense before technology made us think we are immortal and entertainment distracted us from real world.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SuicideWatch/comments/5jin1q/warnin...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SuicideWatch/comments/5x60f0/update...
Which is especially weird for Twitter. Their official iOS client was a third-party API client they bought. Third-parties created @replies, #hashtags, etc. If anyone should recognize the important of third-parties using APIs, it should be Twitter... yet they've been probably the most abusive of the large APIs.
I'm not sure they know what interop means.
Something something, a good craftsman doesn't blame his tools.
Twitter will never change how they do business, replacement is the best strategy.
What an absolute debacle. This doesn't bode well for the entire Twitter platform.
I went through an acquisition of an unsuccessful company. My employer created a shell which is what was acquired. The old corporation wasn't acquired and existed as an independent entity to wind down contracts / deal with the acquisition hold-back, etc.
If eg smyte was out of money, this is plausible. And all of a sudden no-one was there to run the old corp.
crunchbase says they raised a $4m A in Mar 2017, but linkedin says they had 23 employees. They could burn that in 1.25 years with 23 employees and have hit a cash crunch.
I have no knowledge, just speculation.
But if it is all within the states, it could be just that.
> If eg smyte was out of money, this is plausible. And all of a sudden no-one was there to run the old corp.
Sound more like a tech/knowledge acquisition to me.
4M$ for 23 employees only works if you have proper financial management though.
The problem, it seems, Twitter got the timing __all wrong.__
If you buy the assets of the company then usually you do not buy the contracts unless they are specified as sold.
In both cases if there are change-of-control clauses those could trigger with various penalties or rights becoming unlocked.
And if you're thinking "well they could just personally reach out to their customers if they're fired because it's the right thing to do" -- if the last-minute nature of everything is any indication, current/former employees were probably ordered not to say anything.
Twitter is large enough to plan these details. I think it's fair to assume they are at fault until shown otherwise.
I wonder if that triggers any clawbacks in the purchase price, as Smyte was running a substandard service.
I find it hard to believe being acquired magically relieves you of your contractual obligations... could this be cause for litigation?
I guess the real issue is that smyte's contract probably said something like (from GCP's terms of service):
> 13.1 Limitation on Indirect Liability. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, NEITHER PARTY, NOR GOOGLE’S SUPPLIERS, WILL BE LIABLE UNDER THIS AGREEMENT FOR LOST REVENUES OR INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, EVEN IF THE PARTY KNEW OR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT SUCH DAMAGES WERE POSSIBLE AND EVEN IF DIRECT DAMAGES DO NOT SATISFY A REMEDY.
> 13.2 Limitation on Amount of Liability. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, NEITHER PARTY, NOR GOOGLE’S SUPPLIERS, MAY BE HELD LIABLE UNDER THIS AGREEMENT FOR MORE THAN THE AMOUNT PAID BY CUSTOMER TO GOOGLE UNDER THIS AGREEMENT DURING THE TWELVE MONTHS PRIOR TO THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO LIABILITY.
Given there are actual damages coming out of this to paying customers perhaps we’ll finally see them taken to task.
Either way, really poor from Smyte. No reason to immediately turn off access
This problem creeps up with external mfa/2 factor auth APIs that go down, bringing down the main login. Some choose to skip mfa if down, some don’t
This seems like a clear breach of contract. I can’t imagine how anybody thought it was a good idea. Maybe it was a mistake, although that wouldn’t be a whole lot better.
PR will come up with all sorts of reasons said acquisition will benefit both company's customers but I've yet to see it.
At least in Austria we have a law that exactly tries to prevent such things (§38 et seq. UGB): when you buy a company you enter into all of their existing (non highly personal) contracts and obligations, unless you specifically don't want that, in which case you must tell the other side and give them some time.
Genius. /s
This has happened so many times that it can really affect how small companies are preceived as too risky too deal with by larger customers. sigh
Say what you like about Facebook but it does at least seem as though somebody is calling the shots in there.
Twitter and Google wins by having fewer competitors, but the customer loses doubly so. If Facebook acquires every fifth social network, followed by immediate shutdown, users will eventually stop using them, hence less competition as a whole to FB.
Twitter is a pretty big part of any modern online company’s strategy, whether they like it or not.
Friend worked on a large, multi-institutional risk-modelling project ... until the largest institution decided it had enough data on its own, and didn't need competitors who were competitive in this regard, and pulled the plug.
Law of large numbers (statisttics) is powerful. Even for complex (multvariate) models.
It sounds as if there may well be other considerations at play, but I'm answering your question specifically.
In your own example
"Twitter likely doesn't want to allow people to be able to test against their spam shields by spamming other people"
Yes, the attacker may find a new pattern that can bypass the shield, but as soon as that pattern is added to the machine learning recognition, they are then protected against it on their own system.
"spam detection is just pattern recognition"
The more patterns you can analyse, the better your recognition?
Don't give them your data, don't sell your ads on twitter, don't develop for Twitter.
There are alternatives.
"Winding down" literally means that before shutting down, there is an incremental process with the explicit purpose to smoothly move into the transition. There wasn't anything like that, not even a little.
What's especially rich is that Engineering VP Mike Montano nonsensically repeats this phrase after the fact: "we made the difficult decision to wind things down right away". That's plain bullshitting.
He should have said, "we made the difficult decision to shut things down right away". But that would have sounded super irresponsible! But it was super irresponsible, and describing it differently is just dishonest.
And that wasn't accidental, this entire situation is exactly about the difference between "winding down" and "shutting down".
Why do we allow people to communicate in this way? (publicly and/or from a position of leadership). Twisting words in plain sight. There is no good motivation behind this, it represents messed up priorities between appearance/saving-face and responsibility.
I don't know anything else about this Mike Montano. Maybe he's a very good manager when not talking like this. But leadership comes with responsibility and when you twist words like that, it's only because you're trying to wriggle out from underneath the responsibility.
1. Trust small, third-party, closed-source SaaS vendors at your own peril.
2. Do not spend/waste your time integrating with random third party services of questionable/unknown sustainability.
Does the whole page hang? Do UI elements disappear ot overlap others? Do JS error messages surface in the UI? Can the user continue with core functionality or at least receive an explanatory message?
I usually hate it when people blame the victims for being so stupid whenever something bad happens. But some of the victims in this case are corporations with lawayers.
So either this really isn't a mission critical service and they just took a calculated risk, or these lawyers haven't done the job they were hired to do, or Twitter is in breach of contract.
I would say we should use this as a sign to migrate away but we've had enough warnings already. I guess Twitter is too big to fail?
Perhaps they were in violation of either the GDPR or their customer data agreements.
[I've removed the founders' names, even though I strongly disagree with the characterization that I was somehow acting out of rage. My intent was rather consumer advocacy. I've had a service cut off in a similar way, and I view such behavior as being unethical. Fine if you disagree, but please don't characterize my emotional state that led to this post (which itself is in violation of HN's admonition to "Assume good faith")]
All: please keep the internet rage reflex off HN. Same for the online shaming culture.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Edit: I didn't mean that you were feeling rage, but that by posting this way you were stirring it up. In any case, thanks for removing the names.)
I think there is an issue of personal integrity here, even legally.
When I worked for a large F50, our CEO's name had to be on every email we sent out from our German staff - though I'm not sure of the specific German regulation, 'his name is on it' because it's a matter of integrity to the organization.
The founders are generally 'Officers of the Company' - and this implies both a legal/fiduciary and moral obligation in America and most jurisdictions of relevance.
I don't believe that the 'limited personal liability' concept abnegates the responsibilities of the Officers of the Company in this specific regard.
I also don't believe this is a matter of arbitrary doxing if the Officers of the Company are making decisions which are considered foul play in terms of reasonable contractual obligations.
Unless there is an issue of national security or likewise, there's simply no excuse for ending service without reasonable notice.
This is not a political, or socially nuanced discussion such as those involving harassment etc. - this is a matter of commercial civility (and legality).
In American law: "In limited circumstances, such as the sale of the small business to a new owner, the business judgment rule does not apply, and it becomes the burden of CEOs and company directors to demonstrate that their actions were in the company's best interests." [1]
(FYI - the 'business judgement rule' protects Officers from liability.)
I guess I understand we don't want to be doxing folks here ... but I do think it's reasonable that individuals should be held publicly accountable for their commercial actions - for example, someone does an ICO and then - legally - walks away with the cash ... we should rightfully be wary of investing in their next ICO or company for that matter.
The inability for executives to be held accountable for actions of the company is a core problem in present day capitalism, in my opinion.
[1] http://smallbusiness.chron.com/legal-relationship-between-sh...
Yes, we are aware that Smyte is YC W15. Thanks for the reminder that you protect your own from base accountability at high cost to others.
People justifiably have certain expectations when they pay for a serious b2b SaaS that they don't have for a free social media service.
Again, if it turns out that Twitter lied to them about how the service would be wound down, I'm sure that will come out in due time. If I were one of the founders (and I know at least one of them has been often on HN), then I'd be on this thread making some explanations right now.
Finally, the name of the founders isn't some kind of secret. This is public information. The founders have been featured in many media pieces. They sold their company to a public company.
I predict some back-pedalling later today and access switched back on and properly 'wound down'.
If not, customers with contracts should have every right to angrily sue.
1. Smyte had a security flaw that could potentially (or already did) affect twitter customers.
2. Leaving Smyte service on could do alot of damage, so turning it off would be the sensible thing to do.
3. Telling the world about this security flaw would create a really bad backlash.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/how-twitter-made-the...
even as those eulogies were being published, things started changing. Twitter began beating earnings expectations. Star ex-employees trickled back in, finding a new, more positive internal culture than the toxic one they’d left. Advertisers came back too, as did users. The company finally began addressing its trolling problem. And its stock, once unappealing to analysts like Nathanson at $14, is now trading above $46.
It’s still somewhat taboo to say it, but it’s no longer possible to deny it: Twitter is making an unexpected, somewhat miraculous comeback. It is the first major consumer social company to lose users and start growing again in a meaningful way.
The real surprise is that they've failed to effectively monetize their huge, huge audience.
Yesterday I wanted to look at some joke account (by correctly spelled name), Google yields nothing from the domain, Twitter wants me to sign up to search there ...
(Not a habitual user, or even reader, as you may guess.)
However that situation would usually never be described as an acquisition by the buyer. (The seller might put out an announcement that says “We’re proud to be joining FooGleZon, it’s been an amazing journey!”)
In Smyte’s case, Twitter PR does use the word “acquire”: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/...
That sounds like something else than an “amazing journey” non-acquisition. But IANAL, just speculating out loud.
Hmm, is the new owner not bound by that contract?
Create a product, gather funding.
Attract customers.
Get acquired, founders make bank.
New owners trash the product, stranding customers.
Tell me again how this is good system not for only making money but actually providing value to customers.
I would argue that most new companies (at least started by and solely run by technical founders) fail exactly because of that.
Product-oriented people tend to think that the success of a business is due to its product(s), when the reality is businesses succeed due to their ability to sell their products. Hence, the most important thing is actually being able to properly find and target an audience, which should be the first step of starting a business.
The second step of starting a business should be to test marketing channels to make sure the selected audience can be effectively/efficiently reached. Only after this has been properly done should a product be ideated, based on the knowledge acquired about the target audience and the marketing channel(s) that work.
Just my 2 cents to the HN community after having learned this lesson the hard way, failing multiple times and starting several businesses.
What's more, you could be product focused and still produce bad products. I just left a startup that seemed to have really bad decision making in areas like "what feature should we build first/second/third", and major areas needing design and careful thought were instead treated as an afterthought. But the tech was solid and lots of work was getting done, so... good enough?
I'm a tech worker who doesn't live and work in the Sili Valley reality distortion field (SVRDF). From outside the SVRDF it's hard for most people to tell one company from another. They all look like SV. That means they all look a little untrustworthy and a little dangerous.
Now, sure, this Smyte had an insider's brand, sort of like "key gaffer" in the movie industry. But their shenanigans, and Twitter's, just made it harder for all the rest of us to sell to prospects outside the SVRDF.
Y Combinator, will you consider doing some time on basic business ethics with your incubator residents? (I'm talking about stuff like "don't screw your customers, suppliers, or shareholders: keep your promises and honor your contracts.")
Does the rapacious acquisition game of Silicon Valley and seemingly increased rate of consolidation of startups to established giants feel weirdly like he days of Ma Bell to anyone else?
It seems like more and more There's tales of these acqui-hires with promises that the aquirer will present some kind of "polished" alternative but under the larger brand and I've found quite frequently the promised offer-if ever shipped at all-is far less superior and far more self serving to the brand than what was previously offer by the acquired when they had more on the line by operating as a startup.
Or am I just a cynic?
This is such a constant thing that right now, I'm very reluctant to use startup-made SaaS for anything that isn't throwaway. The expected lifetime of a service is just extremely low, and the cost of integration (lock-in due to platform idiosyncrasies, and your data being taken hostage) is too high.
You couldn't develop telephony product at all unless you were Bell.
Do you have any data to support increased acquisition rate?
Welcome to being wrong on this if some good soul does have the data on this, though. It's why I asked, maybe someone has research that would prove me wrong and I'll gladly take being corrected on the matter.
So, anyone got a non-paywalled version of this?
Is anyone else as tired of this schism of material gain over all other considerations? If the tech industry wants to end up with the same ill repute as Wall Street this is certainly the right way to go about it.
"Tech company takes money and screws over customers" is a headline that writes itself.
How many more examples do we need for this to sink in?
Back when it was more traditional to buy a software licences and self-host rather than pay a rolling subscription to an XaaS, a service going dark just meant that you were shut out of updates but not the software itself. Sure you'd still eventually need to migrate away but at least you could then do it on your own terms.
I think people often underestimate the value of being able to manage their own destiny. They key point here is "manage" though: you have to actually do it - it's an active process.
If, on the other hand, you simply stick your head in the sand and ignore the situation it will eventually get to the point where it becomes extremely difficult and expensive to deal with due to a variety of factors such as no clear migration path, loss of institutional knowledge, and so on. I name no names, but worked for one UK company in particular with form here.
I'm not making an argument against SaaS (we use a few of them), but it's important to understand the trade-offs you're making in terms of ceding control.
I really dislike this idea that it's our responsibility to ignore inflammatory tones and trolling, instead of it being the responsibility of the poster to communicate clearer.
Any usage kf SaaS would require a solid contract in place and a plan B (and C, and D, etc) to reach even a fraction the reliability of e.g electricity or food.
Electricity and water are heavily regulated and often government owned, not run by Silicon Valley cowboys.
He has written multiple deployment options. Kubernetes, Docker swarm, bare VMs, etc. He has tested all of them and written installation tools that can deploy to any of them.
For exactly the reason you imply, he doesn't trust any of these options to always be available. I think this mentality has a lot to do with why his service scales so well.
Screwed? Maybe, maybe not. At risk? Abso-fucking-lutely. There are plenty of stories out there of companies who had their AWS accounts shut-down for some random reason, plenty of stories of AWS outages, etc. Even if Amazon does't pull a "Smyte", there's plenty of risk associated with being on (or "solely on") AWS.
By and large, anytime you are completely dependent on someone else's platform, you are increasing risk by putting your destiny in someone else's hands.
At the moment everyone is trying to do a land grab, but once that phase is over and the market consolidates on 2 or 3 cloud providers and sysadmin skills have disappeared we'll see what a disaster it is.
Also, such risks can be insured.
Also, such risks can be mitigated in various ways - I recall having a contract where the source code of any product version delivered to us would be held in escrow at a third party, and in case the supplier went out of business or a bunch of other conditions, we'd get their code and legal rights to use/modify/maintain it ourselves or through some contractor.
A contract is between you and some entity - if you want to protect yourself against that entity "dying", then that can be done by a contract with someone else (e.g. insurer, escrow, etc) who can make you whole even if that entity is dead.
Your company isnt going to die without it (its not like Hootsuite losing access to the Twitter API or Heroku cut off from aWS) But it might be more effective with it.
This is BS.
Sadly, no.
The majority of services have complex functions often requiring key data and updates, and it's just not possible, let alone feasible to 'self host' most things.
But it's a neat idea ... maybe there's a solution there ...
Sure, it sucks that people lost an API they were using, that much we know, but hundreds of votes for a “bad” commercial transaction on which we have no details?
The way I see it, a number of Smyte users just received a free billing period of API access?
Did customers pre-pay for Smyte service and not receive it?
> According to reports from those affected, Smyte disabled access to its API with very little warning to clients, and without giving them time to prepare. Customers got a phone call, and then – boom – the service was gone. Clients had multi-year contracts in some cases.
Everybody got 30mins before lights out. It broke stuff.