Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery

https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930010311998246

by jeroenhd • 1 year ago

240 110 1 year ago

kwanbix• 1 year ago

That people continue to use ORACLE products is one of those misteries I can not understand for much thought that I put into it.

dijit3• 1 year ago

There have been many times where I have tried to warn people on HN not to get into bed with Oracle.[0][1][2][3]

But people have a hard time resisting free stuff.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33199750

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075210

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883

StressedDev4• 1 year ago

You had a bad experience with Oracle and I get that. They didn't treat you well. However, not everyone has a bad experience with them and a lot of companies make mistakes and treat customers poorly. The question is not did it happen, the question is how often does it happen and how does the organization handle it. If Oracle has millions of customers and you are the only one they harmed, they are probably doing great. If your experience is a rare occurrence (say it occurs to 1% or 0.5% of customers), then everyone should avoid Oracle because they don't know if or when they will be the next victim.

In the OP's case, I have several comments:

- Companies should always be able to explain why an account was closed. If the person violated a policy, the exact line or paragraph of the policy should be given to the customer along with a detailed explanation of how the customer violated the policy.

- Companies should always notify customers when they close an account or when a customer is violating the terms of service. These notices should clearly explain what the customer did and should explain how they violated a policy.

- Companies should expect their automated systems and employees to make mistakes. They should rectify mistakes when they are found.

I think Oracle treated dijit and the OP horribly. I think Oracle should do a root cause analysis to determine why they misbehaved, fix the problem, reinstate the account (assuming the OP is telling the truth), and publicly apologize. Internally, Oracle should learn from this and fix their processes and communications.

dkjaudyeqooe• 1 year ago

Seriously, it's the most abusive company on earth.

joshuaissac• 1 year ago

To be fair, shutting things down without notice is not something Oracle is known for.

Usually, they just increase prices by a lot once the customer is locked in.

echelon• 1 year ago

You definitely don't want to be on Oracle cloud then.

Stay far away from Stargate.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2• 1 year ago

Honestly, I have never been in a position to see their salespeople so I have to assume they must be wining and dining the bosses first, because in my little corner of the universe, every single like entity uses them to some degree. I personally do not understand it.

yawndex• 1 year ago

The price of "free" is very tempting. I guess the cost of the servers they offer is having to put up with idiotic requirements like "CPU utilization for the 95th percentile [must be more] than 20%" [1], or they'll shut off your server.

I use one of these servers for hosting some non-critical things, but nothing that I run there is particularly CPU intensive, so I was just forced to set up a cronjob that periodically spikes the CPU to 100% for a few minutes.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

ndsipa_pomu• 1 year ago

In general, I agree but there's a lot of people "locked-in" to using their products so once a poor decision has been made, it's costly to move away from them.

I signed up a personal Oracle Cloud account to make use of their always-free tier of VMs. I was lucky to be able to get 4 of the VM.Standard.A1.Flex instances which have been running fine for a couple of years now. I've heard various tales of people on the free tier getting instances/accounts deleted for having idle instances, but presumably my backup of them is enough to stop them from being registered as idle (I've got a couple of websites running on them too, but they're just for my use).

malux85• 1 year ago

The cold hard truth of the world is that things are not evaluated solely meritoriously by everyone.

Oracle know this, in fact, they rely on it.

If they are trying to win a big corporate contract you know a good way to get it? :

The dude who has an enormous amount of say is head of I.T. at EnormousBeanFactory, the world’s largest supplier of canned beans. Is it a sexy industry? Nope, but they do 3 billion a year in beans.

This dude is in his mid 50s, bald, out of shape, big glasses, and is likely very single. He has a comfortable wage but he’s not rich. He hasn’t gotten laid in 20 years.

Send in the energetic and charismatic Oracle salesman, instantly invite this guy for all expenses trip to Aspen to discuss the deal, but don’t make it obvious, a few 5 star lunches locally first. When in Aspen make sure this guy has the time of his life, got it? Here’s 20k expense account, this guy is going to have a weekend he is not going to forget. Do I need to spell out the details for you?

Once he’s back at his job and had a few days to recover then land the fish while the memories are still fresh, as long as your product MINIMALLY functions, they’ll sign.

Of course I personally think this is atrocious way of doing business, but I am wise enough to not let my rosy ideals prevent me from seeing the reality of the world, so there it is. That’s why “people continue to use ORACLE” products.

dijit3• 1 year ago

People will think that this is ridiculous, but I can tell you from experience that this is exactly what happens.

You are often relying on the altruism of the C-levels to care about people more than the “vibes” that sales people can give off, which just happens to be helped by expensive lunches, trips, invitations to shows with VIP seats, and being welcomed with beaming smiles and open arms like a celebrity at their HQ.

Obviously its not just Oracle that does this, all the large companies do it- even the ones you think have crappy support like Google.

These are hard things to turn down, and if you think you can you’re probably wrong.

StressedDev4• 1 year ago

People probably continue to use Oracle products because Oracle makes a lot of good and useful products. Oracle is typically not criticized for its products, its criticized for its high prices and price increases.

snailmailstare• 1 year ago

You could only mean the database? The stuff I am familiar with was good before they bought it and is better somewhere else despite all their work to choke options with IP law.

bastardoperator• 1 year ago

I find it interesting that Tiktok went with Oracle given their history with the CIA.

7thpower2• 1 year ago

I think it was more that Oracle was willing to take the political risk and had a lot of incentive to land a large, high visibility client that could help them build economies of scale and would come with a tier 1 JV partner.

There is a lot of upside for Oracle based on their position relative to others and Ellison does not have to manage his political capital the same way non-founder CEOs do (he made this move long before Trump’s second term).

NewJazz• 1 year ago

There was political pressure. Still there.

jeroenhd5• 1 year ago

They have an excellent free tier for experimenting with some higher power ARM servers. As long as you're ready to give up when they decide they don't like you any more, that's a pretty cool deal. Just don't ever build anything with their hardware or software that you'd like to keep.

Edit: Java is usually pretty good, too. At least the open source stuff. Maybe stuff like GraalVM too but they had that locked down in licenses for a while and I don't trust Oracle at all.

7thpower2• 1 year ago

Sadly, I have been unable to secure one of those higher power free servers. I’ve been trying for a couple weeks now.

That was literally the only reason I was willing to give Oracle a shot.

Daviey• 1 year ago

I've been trying to sign up to them for over a year, and it keeps failing. Support tickets remain unanswered.

crayonista2• 1 year ago

Yeah, I have a free-tier ARM VM, and it's great as a remote Nix builder for aarch64.

If I lost it, I'd just have to do building locally.

marcosdumay2• 1 year ago

It's cheap. And its free tier is really large.

And after that stops applying, you have spent a huge amount of work managing your software around their idiosyncrasies. So doing the same for another supplier looks like a huge (probably unsurmountable) task.

belter3• 1 year ago

This as been posted here in at least 60 occasions...But clearly not enough times..: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1982

diyseguy• 1 year ago

Why do people want to pay for Oracle when PostgreSQL and MySQL are free and work well?

AtlasBarfed• 1 year ago

Mistake +mystery = mistery

rdtsc• 1 year ago

And it’s only one “t” away from “misery” ;-)

Artoooooor• 1 year ago

If you have big system using specifics of their databases, switching can be expensive. Maybe good in long term, but risky.

fluidcruft• 1 year ago

Are there even any other options if you're running EPIC?

hulitu• 1 year ago

People never learn. The same issues are with PayPal and Stripe. Also people do not seem to grasp that "the cloud" is "someone else's computer".

Only when their accounts are swiftly terminated, they start crying for help on HN.

that_guy_iain3• 1 year ago

That has to be breach of contract. The guy was a paying customer and never missed a payment.

I highly suspect this is caused by a bug.

RobGR2• 1 year ago

If it was caused by a bug they wouldn't have told him "you have no future with oracle" and that he couldn't create a new account -- they would have just created a new account, apologized, and given him a few months credit.

that_guy_iain3• 1 year ago

It on the Terms of Service, it said customers are only eligible to sign up once. Which sounds like something in the terms of service. They didn't say you're banned from using the service but instead said people are only eligible to sign up once.

crote• 1 year ago

What are you going to do, sue Oracle?

ErikUden13• 1 year ago

You'd have to be a madman.

Marsymars2• 1 year ago

Small claims court is, in many jurisdictions, quite friendly to small claimants suing large corporations for legitimate grievances. Procedurally they don’t reward having expensive legal teams, so all that having an expensive legal team does is cost you more in billable hours.

RobGR2• 1 year ago

Ever since seeing this talk https://archive.org/details/youtube-eXe-rvXVL-g , whenever I see these stories of kafkaesque incidents, I am reminded that there is a common way to describe all of them -- the lack of due process.

hosteur• 1 year ago

ErikUden13• 1 year ago

Interestingly enough, I initially thought so too! I have received several E-Mails, skimmed through them, and then when my account was gone I first thought “Oh, I've ignored the 'Final Warning' E-Mails for too long and now they've nuked my account” but now! That's (sadly) not the case.

I know this for two reasons: First of all, I manage two separate Oracle Cloud Accounts (one for a different person). The second one wasn't nuked, despite both using the same cloud computer and being created on the same day.

Second, I have MFA enabled since day one. I logged in many times, before, during, and after these E-Mails bombarded me. They never applied to me as my security policies were already like the mails requested!

So, sadly. It has nothing to do with Oracle enabling MFA. Especially because I'm not stuck at an MFA screen, but because they disabled my account and support said it was deleted, without notice or warning, and they can't tell me why and there's also nothing they could do.

latchkey• 1 year ago

OP is suggesting it is in retaliation for a criticizing viral post...

https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930176963645558

epakai• 1 year ago

He also points out his own accusation is baseless:

https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930295586771514

and a longer explanation of his thoughts (mostly that Oracle has left him in the dark so all he can offer is conspiratorial speculation)

https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930279621469673

Anyway, since Oracle won't say, it seems fine to take adverse inference.

ErikUden13• 1 year ago

Thank you for writing this. As much as I love conspiracies, I'm not that full of myself to think this CEO has nothing better to do than to stalk some random German guy's MASTODON account. The sad part is that this was just bound to happen sooner than later, even to someone who recently criticized Oracle.

croes• 1 year ago

If it’s not because of the viral post it’s somewhat worse.

Because of the post would at least mean for some reason.

mgdev2• 1 year ago

I was charged $5k due to a bug on Oracle's side.

I initially escalated to support. Similar thing - they said there was nothing they could do, and that I needed to cut a ticket to another team... one which I couldn't contact. They simply closed the ticket.

I did a chargeback for that portion of my bill. TBD whether they will nuke my account or not.

ErikUden13• 1 year ago

Jesus...

Marsymars2• 1 year ago

Weirdly, this could be an upside of going with Oracle first. i.e. If my Oracle account gets nuked for a chargeback, it’s much less of a problem than if my Google/MS/Amazon accounts get nuked.

mgdev2• 1 year ago

Update: they contested my chargeback. Going through round 2!

JaggerFoo• 1 year ago

This happened to me when Oracle first started in the cloud business. I actively avoid doing business with their cloud services.

ErikUden13• 1 year ago

I think I learned the lesson the hard way.

bluesounddirect• 1 year ago

hey how else are they going to make space for project stargate! your data has been deported.

Hizonner• 1 year ago

Run. Important. Things. On. Premises.

Idiots.

marcinzm• 1 year ago

Until your datacenter and the one next to it and all your backups literally burn down. Don't make life decisions on edge cases. One way or the other.

esskay2• 1 year ago

Or just dont use a company with a VERY well known history of wiping cloud accounts. I mean it's Oracle, you'd have to be very naive to trust them with your data.

Cieric2• 1 year ago

I've never really mentioned it elsewhere, but the last time I even considered doing something with oracle was I believe when they released the free-tier arm instance and I was just going to compile some of my projects to arm to see if they worked well.

Well since I'm not in the business of trusting a lot of corporations I decided to use a privacy.com virtual card that only had a one time transaction and would close afterwards. Well after signing up and starting the instance and doing some quick tests. I ended up coming back to it a bit later and found out the account was just out right terminated. After a while of going through support and looking around at what logs I could get, turns out they tried to do a $0.01 charge on the card and since it failed marked the card as stolen (or something similar.) And even with a long conversation with support they told me there was literally nothing that could be done, not even with proof of identification or anything. Even making a new account didn't work since something was matching and they were rejecting me making a new account (don't know if it was address, ip or my name.)

At this point I share the opinion that others here are sharing, no matter the reason never work with oracle. I'm just lucky they made the decision for me and I never even have to consider the choice again.

alfiedotwtf• 1 year ago

That charge of $0.01 is common practice to verify the card is legit, and will be reversed.

Strange that privacy.com doesn’t support this… but thanks for the link, I’ve never heard of them before

DangitBobby• 1 year ago

They do. You can vendor lock a card and give it an all-time transaction cap. They've always had vendor locking but IDK if they've always have an all-time cap. I have run into the same problem GP ran into with someone running a test charge and failing the real charge, but I wasn't banned as a result, of course.

Cieric2• 1 year ago

Yeah specifically when I signed up they did the a small charge then, I assumed it only ever do a single charge to check for the legitimacy of the card. If I ever wanted to do a paid tier, I would have changed the card details. But it was a week later that they did a second check even though I hadn't done anything that would incur a charge. The card I had setup with privacy was a charge once card that immediately closes after the first transaction is completed (including charges that are canceled.) So the second charge hit the card after the card was closed. At that point they decided the card must have been stolen and decided to permanently close my account with no recourse.

My guess in the end is they just don't care, I'm not the one that would be giving them lots of money, business contracts are. But they are wrong in the sense that I will never let any company I ever work for choose them if I have any say in the matter.

StefanBatory2• 1 year ago

But there are valid reasons for it to get rejected - I have my limit on my card set to 0, so that in case the information gets stolen, I won't get any damage right away. And it happened a few times I went to get something and forgot I haven't temporarily changed it.

microflash• 1 year ago

no matter the reason never work with oracle

I wholeheartedly agree on this. I had the misfortune of working with an unholy combination of ODI [1], OBP [2], and Oracle Database several years ago. The amount of layers of abstraction and bureaucracy I had to wade through to get things done was enormous and life-draining. Since then, I have made sure to move teams away from Oracle wherever I could and not once have I regretted doing so.

[1] https://www.oracle.com/middleware/technologies/data-integrat...

[2] https://www.oracle.com/financial-services/banking/banking-pl...

nubinetwork• 1 year ago

One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison strikes again... but for the life of me, I don't understand why this guy isn't calling his credit card company to cancel payments for a service he's not receiving...

theyinwhy• 1 year ago

By not canceling payments he is making his case ready to go to court.

ErikUden13• 1 year ago

To be fair, at this point I got a week of different support calls, teams, online forms and live chats behind me. I cannot login to the account which would allow me to cancel payments, and every number I talk to tells me they're not able to cancel the payment as they're not authorized.

To be fair, it was, so far, never my main goal to get that payment canceled, but I'm not going to put in any more effort after today.

Will I go to court? Depends on what my insurance and legal insurance says on Monday. Do I want to go to court? No. After seeing all these people tell me the same thing happened to them, would it be good to go to court? Absolutely.

esskay2• 1 year ago

This isnt new or abnormal. Oracle Cloud has been doing this for years. It's why when you see posts recommending it on reddit it's almost followed up with someone saying not to be stupid enough to use Oracle Cloud.

Honestly more fool anyone who trusts Oracle with anything, let alone keeping their sites/apps online.

daneel_w2• 1 year ago

It matters whether you are still on an unpaid tenancy or have upgraded to a paid tenancy, even if you're only using "Always Free" resources for a total of $0.00 per month. Resources occupied by an unpaid tenancy may be deallocated without warning in order to satisfy a request from a paid tenancy. However, there's really no way we can know if the OP did or did not breach the TOS, which seems likelier given that they underline they were a paying customer.

ErikUden13• 1 year ago

I wish I was breaching the ToS in some way, but the server was merely running a (fairly private) Nextcloud instance. I mean, of course you just have my written word, but there was nothing fishy going on there.

Also, at least they could tell me the ToS violation...

daneel_w2• 1 year ago

Also, at least they could tell me the ToS violation...

Agreed. Cutting you off like this and leaving you hanging was a very dysfunctional and unfriendly way of handling their business.

jwrallie• 1 year ago

I was bit by something like this. Cc expired, then my server was gone, no warning emails, no way to login to ask for support because it said my account did not exist. Trying to register an account with the same email said I was already registered.

I checked my spam too, nothing. I was not a paying customer, so I’m sure they do not miss me, and I understand that their free deal is not good for them long term, but I wish at least they had the courtesy to give me an email explaining why and maybe a day or two to ensure my backups were OK (they were).

linacica• 1 year ago

Sorry for my bad english its my third language

My experience was quite roller coaster with oracle, i have to mention im a student and wanted to try their free tier so i could learn more about enterprise cloud hosted VM’s and networking, signup was good for me, but when i tried selecting an arm instance it would be always out of capacity, and i mean i was on oracle from around 2022 until 2024 first half maybe?, i checked it multiple times but ARM instances would just never be avilable(i was on zurich servers, i thought about moving my account to another location-tenancy but i found out it isnt possible) so i was stuck with 2 single core epyc systems with just enough ram, it was fine to test stuff but i quickly got a big issue: networking is a mess on oracle, i mean i couldnt count how many jumps i needed to go through to actualy enable other services, it may be skill issue, but why have multiple software based firewalls? Sometimes having one software would be fine like iptables? Anyways, i was pretty fed up with not being able to do much and networking being this bad, then it come in first half 2024 an update that they forced 2FA on my account even tho i didnt wanted any of it, i logged in had to set it up and forgot to disable it back because i Dont want 2fa, i just wanna you let me manage my own security please. A month later i lost access to my phone which had the 2fa app(dont buy chinese phones, they die too early, motherboard died in it and i dont have money to recover from such state), i asked the customer support if theres some way to reset it and get back in well there is just i need to go throught some software which was legal age by now, and navigate it with vague instructions, after 2 days of calling them and trying to do it i gave up

If you still wanna learn working with servers, networking etc. i recommend just getting your own server or choosing some other provider, NAT is not an excuse, cloudlfare tunnel helps you out,

jeroenhd5• 1 year ago

Their cloud management and firewall situation is quite terrible. Not any better or worse than AWS or GCP or Azure, but still quite terrible.

It's actually quite neat for large deployments with thousands of containers so you don't need to manually interact with a billion firewalls by just generating all the cloud settings automatically, but for the free trial stuff you're going to need to brute force the security settings web interface until you've checked enough boxes to allow traffic on all ports.

As for the 2FA thing, IMO any cloud company like Oracle should enforce that. Companies get stuck with giant bills all the time because someone got into their cloud accounts and started spinning up crypto miners like crazy.

Jumping straight into the unnecessarily complicated world of Big Cloud seems like a challenging way to begin learning about servers, you'd probably be better off renting a small VPS somewhere instead. Or running a server in your home network, that'll also work just fine at first!

ErikUden13• 1 year ago

Thank you for sharing your experience!

codr7• 1 year ago

How about simply refusing to work with them ever again?

I'm sure HN would be enough to reach critical mass and send Ellison back where he came from.

ErikUden13• 1 year ago

I whole heartedly support this movement

foxfired• 1 year ago

Oracle probably has the best sales team in the industry. No developer ever suggests an oracle product as the tool of choice, yet here they are.

We learned when we switched away from Oracle DB due to performance issues. We were told that we needed to get back on it immediately. Our contract required all tools to use Oracle DB and we had to consult with their rep when making upgrades.

So yeah, it's entirely your fault. You didn't read the contract! /s

ErikUden13• 1 year ago

Haha, funnily enough this is my fault. Before I began using oracle many years ago, someone had this happen to them. I thought “This will never happen to me. They must've done something wrong and aren't willing to admit it.” Well, here we are.

jeroenhd5• 1 year ago

I think there are maybe two exceptions to the "no dev will suggest Oracle": Java (but you use a JVM maintained by someone else) and MySQL (unfortunately a requirement for certain combinations of languages and frameworks).

I also remember reading about Oracle's RHEL clone (Oracle Linux) supposedly bring quite good for running on MacBooks in a VM because it comes with all the emulation libraries and stuff preconfigured? Nothing you can't do on Alma or Rocky but you'd need to configure it yourself.

No business should ever make the mistake of signing a contract with Oracle, though. Their sales team is just a customer facing extension of their main business: their legal team.

jimmydoe• 1 year ago

I got cold email titled "Michelin-Star Dinner Experience", I thought that's spam but turned out to be Oracle Cloud.

I don't know about others, this certainly made me dislike them...

skissane2• 1 year ago

Reminds me of some months back Google accidentally deleted a very big customer and it took them a week to restore them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40304666

EDIT: I originally said "they" which in the context would be read as "Oracle". My mind was confusing Google and Oracle, in part because of the common element of Thomas Kurian

dlgeek• 1 year ago

That was Google, not Oracle.

skissane2• 1 year ago

Yes, you are right. The fact that Thomas Kurian was involved mangled my memory because he used to be at Oracle.

ErikUden13• 1 year ago

Thank you for posting this here. I am glad many people are sharing their story in the comments.

bityard• 1 year ago

Having worked in the hosting business, this is a very normal interaction when the provider believes the account was used for fraud or something illegal or strongly against the ToS. Support personnel are literally not allowed to say why the account was closed because that would be giving potential fraudsters information on how to stay hidden in the future.

OCI likely sees TONS of fraud every day due to the generous free tier offering. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if MOST new accounts created are for attempted shadiness.

I'm definitely not accusing the author of doing anything shady, but clearly Oracle believes they did, for one reason or another. It could be their usage patterns triggered some flag, or maybe one of their instances got compromised and started spamming the government.

Still, OCI definitely could have handled it better.

Havoc• 1 year ago

That’s how they roll yes. Good free tier but don’t trust it with anything that matters

fargle• 1 year ago

oh, no! the lawnmower has just run over my foot, and cut off my toes.

and now won't apologize or give them back.

my appologies to Bryan Cantrill

Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery

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