<story><title>&quot;DigitalOcean Killed Our Company&quot;</title><url>https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1134529316904153089</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bcooks</author><text>Thanks for the replies. 
Let me try to address a few of the things I have seen here. We haven&amp;#x27;t completed our investigation yet which will include details on the timeline, decisions made by our systems, our people, and our plans to address where we fell short. That said, I want to provide some information now rather than waiting for our full post-mortem analysis. A combination of factors, not just the usage patterns, led to the initial flag. We recognize and embrace our customers ability to spin up highly variable workloads, which would normally not lead to any issues. Clearly we messed up in this case.&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the steps taken in our response to the false positive did not follow our typical process. As part of our investigation, we are looking into our process and how we responded so we can improve upon this moving forward.</text></item><item><author>bcooks</author><text>As DigitalOcean&amp;#x27;s CTO, I&amp;#x27;m very sorry for this situation and how it was handled. The account is now fully restored and we are doing an investigation of the incident. We are planning to post a public postmortem to provide full transparency for our customers and the community.&lt;p&gt;This situation occurred due to false positives triggered by our internal fraud and abuse systems. While these situations are rare, they do happen, and we take every effort to get customers back online as quickly as possible. In this particular scenario, we were slow to respond and had missteps in handling the false positive. This led the user to be locked out for an extended period of time. We apologize for our mistake and will share more details in our public postmortem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cprayingmantis</author><text>With all due respect I think you’ve missed the point. The larger point from my perspective is that you denied your client the ability to move their data off your platform. This would be akin to someone breaking the terms of their lease and you confiscating all their belongings with the intent of burning them. You should provide some sort of grace period for users to move their data off your platform. For everyone else reading this this is should be a wake up call why you should never trust your data to a singular entity. Even if they have 99.9999% uptime you never know when they’ll decide to deny you access to your data.</text></comment>
<story><title>&quot;DigitalOcean Killed Our Company&quot;</title><url>https://twitter.com/w3Nicolas/status/1134529316904153089</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bcooks</author><text>Thanks for the replies. 
Let me try to address a few of the things I have seen here. We haven&amp;#x27;t completed our investigation yet which will include details on the timeline, decisions made by our systems, our people, and our plans to address where we fell short. That said, I want to provide some information now rather than waiting for our full post-mortem analysis. A combination of factors, not just the usage patterns, led to the initial flag. We recognize and embrace our customers ability to spin up highly variable workloads, which would normally not lead to any issues. Clearly we messed up in this case.&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the steps taken in our response to the false positive did not follow our typical process. As part of our investigation, we are looking into our process and how we responded so we can improve upon this moving forward.</text></item><item><author>bcooks</author><text>As DigitalOcean&amp;#x27;s CTO, I&amp;#x27;m very sorry for this situation and how it was handled. The account is now fully restored and we are doing an investigation of the incident. We are planning to post a public postmortem to provide full transparency for our customers and the community.&lt;p&gt;This situation occurred due to false positives triggered by our internal fraud and abuse systems. While these situations are rare, they do happen, and we take every effort to get customers back online as quickly as possible. In this particular scenario, we were slow to respond and had missteps in handling the false positive. This led the user to be locked out for an extended period of time. We apologize for our mistake and will share more details in our public postmortem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lioeters</author><text>Thank you for jumping in personally to clarify what happened.&lt;p&gt;As a business owner with much of our infrastructure depending on DigitalOcean, the incident is concerning. It affects the reputation of DO as well as its customers.&lt;p&gt;The demographics on Twitter and especially here on HN represents a sizable crowd with decision-making influence on DO&amp;#x27;s bottom line. I hope to see some effort being made to prevent situations like this in the future, and to regain the trust.&lt;p&gt;As a (so far) satisfied customer, it&amp;#x27;s great to hear that:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; A &lt;i&gt;combination of factors, not just the usage patterns&lt;/i&gt;, led to the initial flag.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We recognize and embrace our customers ability to spin up &lt;i&gt;highly variable workloads, which would normally not lead to any issues&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; we are looking into our process and how we responded so we can &lt;i&gt;improve upon this&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>