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Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know if it's a promise ...

I suspect that it almost definitely is not.

As IT professionals we should do better than use words like 'kill' to describe system and account changes.

As I understand it, Digital Ocean suspended the account, and because the (perceived) problem was related to excessive / potentially fraudulent CPU usage, they suspended the machines. The data contained on them was not deleted. Does that match your reading?

As someone who suffered from extremely noisy neighbours in AWS (in the very early days), risking significant damage to the performance guarantees to our customers, I'm actually cautiously happy with automated protection systems. Naturally I'd rather noisy neighbours were throttled so that I never heard them, and I expect that's closer to what happens these days

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I think 'kill' is appropriate here. They shut down access to his company's account along with all running infrastructure and after escalating multiple times, their final official response (after 30hrs of silence) was that his company was permanently denied access to the account (DO calls it 'account termination' in their postmortem). The first tweet of the thread that went viral was 'How Digital Ocean just killed our company' [https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1134529316904153089].

I don't want to spent too much time dumping on them since they clearly know how badly this situation was handled, but this is an example of terrible automated protection leading to a company that's not enterprise-ready. As you say, AWS probably doesn't publicly promise not to terminate your account, but this would never happen because they understand that availability and security matter more than anything else when running B2B infrastructure.

On review, the wording is quite vague.

From TFA:

> Shortly thereafter, DigitalOcean investigated the issue and the Raisup account was unlocked and powered back on.

But it's not clear if any data was deleted by DigitalOcean.

The suggestion the account was unlocked rather than re-created suggests it was not, but OTOH there's no reference to erase, delete, restore, or indeed current state of customer data in that post mortem.

The fact that data didn't get deleted is irrelevant if the customer can't actually get at that data.

That the customer got unlocked is of course a good thing, but for at least 30 hours the customer couldn't access their data, that's highly problematic.

Nothing was deleted or removed. The droplets were powered off and the access to them locked. once (way too long later) the unlock happened the customer had full control and access again.

Good to hear - that's how I'd assumed things went, but thank you for clarifying Barry.

>> I don't know if it's a promise ...

>I suspect that it almost definitely is not.

It's not a promise. But they don't shut it down without letting you know they're going to be shutting it down first.

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