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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

HN is NOT a support channel for Github, Apple, Microsoft, Paypal, Google and a 100 other services out there that have piss-poor customer support. If the only way to get a rise out of these companies is to abuse HN then that should be indication enough whether or not you should route a critical part of your business through them.

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No but these kind of posts raise awareness of problems that affect many many people. I'm happy that this becomes public for the guy in question and for everyone of us.

You can see these on a daily basis by now. Just the other day, major Youtube channel blocked, Gsuite accounts suspended without warning (after a decade of forking over cash) and so on. The only warning you will ever need is this one: Don't trust the cloud, don't trust cloud providers and make sure your mission critical path is only tied to things that you can control or that you have a 'hot' spare standing by for. Otherwise sooner or later you will be bitten.

You are absolutely right - you can't just handover a kill switch for your business to a megacorp. However, there are a lot of instances where alternatives are not viable because of the same megacorps. For example, email is a major online ID and being locked out of it can be disastrous even for an individual. Ideally, you would want an email server of your own - but then the 2 major email providers simply junk the mail from small servers even when they have good spam filter score. Similar story about search engines directing traffic to imposters. There are no reasons to believe that this is unintentional. This wouldn't be a problem if everyone else had the same priorities as you. What alternative do we have other than to loudly shame them where it matters and get as many people to off those platforms?

That's a good point, especially about the email. I hope that I will be able to ride this one out until my pension date arrives and I no longer have to worry about that. The internet started with the best of intentions but it is rapidly turning into something far worse than AOL: at least with AOL you had the option to ignore it.

So far, only Microsoft has been a nuisance to my personal SMTP server (there's an open issue about Microsoft's dubious blacklists on GitHub, with several participants: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/microsoft-365-docs/issues/5...).

Just a little part of why I hate and mistrust that company.

Me too. I've repeatedly had deliverability problems to Microsoft. Everywhere else has had no problems apart from the initial setup when I didn't know what I was doing.

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