Tell HN: Worst Amazon AWS customer service experience
I.e. Spin up servers too quickly? AWS holds your data hostage indefinitely.
Background:
Had an urgent compute job 2 days ago, that I needed finished ASAP. So I thought great, temporarily spinning up a large amount of compute is exactly what AWS was made for.
So, spun up a dozen c6a.48xlarge's, and things were looking great. Looked set to finish the job within 3 days.
Even put in a request with AWS to triple my quota, to finish the job in just 1 day, and was approved.
Then the nightmare began.
Minutes after approval for the quota increase, I got the "[ACTION REQUIRED] - AWS Account Compromise" email.
So, then immediately went through all the outlined steps:
- Reviewing the account activity. - Adding MFA to the account. - Going line-by-line through the billing with the chat representative to confirm that yes each was authorized. - Explaining my situation as I have here.
Did everything possible, until we reached a point where the AWS representative said there was nothing more I could do.
Problem?
Over 24 hours later and AWS still refuses to give me access to the servers, says there is no ETA, and says there no information available at all.
So now I remain completely locked out of my instances, and unable to access the ~$2k of results I'd computed so far.
Now it's looking like I'll have to start the job over from scratch.
IMO Amazon has effectively stolen $2k from me that I'd spent on computing the intermediate results so far, which they now block me from accessing, with zero recourse and no timeline at all.
Worse off, this huge delay puts my job at risk, and likely costing my employer $10's of thousands or more in losses, from this surprise delay that we could not afford to have, all because we'd trusted AWS to never do something like this.
Suppose this is a warning to never trust AWS again.
What can I do?