<story><title>Apple shut down my iCloud account for five days, no warning, no explanation</title><url>https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-shut-down-my-icloud-account-for-four-days-no-warning-no-explanation-no-excuse</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>londons_explore</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been in the other side of this...&lt;p&gt;You build a new data backend for a service, you test it a million ways, and finally you migrate all the user&amp;#x27;s over.&lt;p&gt;Except it goes wrong.  999,999,999 user accounts migrated.  1 account failed.&lt;p&gt;Leaving the old infrastructure up for that one user is costing millions of dollars a day, hurting performance reliability and failover and holding up hundreds of other engineers projects.&lt;p&gt;Turns out the failure is because the user managed to create a filename with 67000 byte order marks in and nothing else, and it trips up some parser in the new system.  They probably did it using a custom client or some kind of exploit checking tool.  It&amp;#x27;s probably some security vulnerability researchers test account, but we can&amp;#x27;t be sure because we can&amp;#x27;t look into the account for privacy reasons.&lt;p&gt;Yet fixing the bug for that 1 user account is going to take a while - a quick bodge solution breaks other user accounts, and the proper fix is part of Jane&amp;#x27;s project due next quarter.&lt;p&gt;The decision is made.  We&amp;#x27;re going to treat the needs of the many over the few.  We&amp;#x27;re going to disable this one user account and move on.   That user will have to re-upload their data, and this time they won&amp;#x27;t manage to upload a file with 67000 byte order marks in the filename.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>InitialLastName</author><text>In that case, if your system leaves you with no way to contact that user and say &amp;quot;Hey, there&amp;#x27;s an issue with your account that is causing a problem that we need your help to solve, get back to us within 3 days or else we&amp;#x27;re going to need to reset your account&amp;quot;, you&amp;#x27;ve failed at customer service.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple shut down my iCloud account for five days, no warning, no explanation</title><url>https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-shut-down-my-icloud-account-for-four-days-no-warning-no-explanation-no-excuse</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>londons_explore</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been in the other side of this...&lt;p&gt;You build a new data backend for a service, you test it a million ways, and finally you migrate all the user&amp;#x27;s over.&lt;p&gt;Except it goes wrong.  999,999,999 user accounts migrated.  1 account failed.&lt;p&gt;Leaving the old infrastructure up for that one user is costing millions of dollars a day, hurting performance reliability and failover and holding up hundreds of other engineers projects.&lt;p&gt;Turns out the failure is because the user managed to create a filename with 67000 byte order marks in and nothing else, and it trips up some parser in the new system.  They probably did it using a custom client or some kind of exploit checking tool.  It&amp;#x27;s probably some security vulnerability researchers test account, but we can&amp;#x27;t be sure because we can&amp;#x27;t look into the account for privacy reasons.&lt;p&gt;Yet fixing the bug for that 1 user account is going to take a while - a quick bodge solution breaks other user accounts, and the proper fix is part of Jane&amp;#x27;s project due next quarter.&lt;p&gt;The decision is made.  We&amp;#x27;re going to treat the needs of the many over the few.  We&amp;#x27;re going to disable this one user account and move on.   That user will have to re-upload their data, and this time they won&amp;#x27;t manage to upload a file with 67000 byte order marks in the filename.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ska</author><text>&amp;gt; We&amp;#x27;re going to disable this one ...&lt;p&gt;All pretty reasonable; The only thing wrong with your suggestion is it&amp;#x27;s missing the part where you contact that user and let them know what you are doing and why...</text></comment>