> Not everyone is going to see those emails and even those that do may not understand what they are reading.
If that's the case, these companies/people have no business using cloud services. Fair enough that you might not understand the ramification, in that case you contact support. If you don't see those email... that's on you. We operate out of a number of datacenters, they all communicate via email, giving us one month to three notice regarding service windows. If we fail to plan for an outage because we didn't see an email, that's our problem. I don't know why anyone would expect more from a SaaS company.
For really large customers, I would assume that they have a customer service representative and yes that person should have called. If you're just a small customer (even if you might be big in your own mind) and just have an account that get billed to a company credit card each month, it's a little naive to think you'd get anything more than an email.
We've already seen a number SaaS company just shutting of customers for little to no reason, even AWS has done this. Running things in the cloud is a risk, and it's you job as the operations team to stay on top of things, have backup plan, because you cannot expect cloud vendors to care about some random customer who just signed up using a credit card and a nondescript email. They should, but they don't.
A good rule is: Don't expect a SaaS/cloud company to put in more effort contacting you than you did signing up.
> > Not everyone is going to see those emails and even those that do may not understand what they are reading.
>
> If that's the case, these companies/people have no business using cloud services.
Cloud services are responsible for this. I've signed up to many cloud services where I purposefully unchecked all the newsletter/updates/... notifications.
But I still receive notifications for stuff unrelated to what I use. These emails are full of marketing/PR jargon, where it's unclear whether I'm affected by the change or whether there is even a change!
Cloud services are lazy, don't look at their customer use, spam everybody, and blame their customers when they missed an important update due to noise-fatigue.
Unless the cloud provider can provide proof that the person received and read such a notice, then they can still be sued for actual damages... and I'd be surprised if that doesn't happen in this case.
The fact is, there are many options from a cooldown, scream test, automated backup for migration/recovery... this organization did none of those things and absolutely deserves to lose massively as a result. This is a DATABASE as a Service... RETENTION should be one of the highest priorities.
For that matter, it would have been better if they auto-migrated in an OFF status, or otherwise backed up... just hitting the DELETE ALL DATA button is wrong. Several of the posters in the thread indicate they received no such emails.
If that's the case, these companies/people have no business using cloud services. Fair enough that you might not understand the ramification, in that case you contact support. If you don't see those email... that's on you. We operate out of a number of datacenters, they all communicate via email, giving us one month to three notice regarding service windows. If we fail to plan for an outage because we didn't see an email, that's our problem. I don't know why anyone would expect more from a SaaS company.
For really large customers, I would assume that they have a customer service representative and yes that person should have called. If you're just a small customer (even if you might be big in your own mind) and just have an account that get billed to a company credit card each month, it's a little naive to think you'd get anything more than an email.
We've already seen a number SaaS company just shutting of customers for little to no reason, even AWS has done this. Running things in the cloud is a risk, and it's you job as the operations team to stay on top of things, have backup plan, because you cannot expect cloud vendors to care about some random customer who just signed up using a credit card and a nondescript email. They should, but they don't.
A good rule is: Don't expect a SaaS/cloud company to put in more effort contacting you than you did signing up.