ChrisDutrow

Holy. Shit.

That would have been a freaking disaster if that happened to us, especially having to re-tool the application for new SIDs. I'm a little surprised that there is not a cooling off period after an account deletion as opposed to deleting everything immediately.

At least you got the numbers back.

What was the nature of the problem you had with them?

Mostly I can forget they exist and do other things with my business. But my use case is very vanilla: no outbound automated marketing, its used by only a few people at my specific company, we're not even a tech company -just blue collar stuff.

This year has been different though. I had to verify that I had a real business so that my number didn't get blocked on certain carriers, submitting the paperwork in the right way turned out to be kind of difficult, however I don't think this was something they had control over if I understand the situation correctly. One of the carriers blocked us anyway (They were blocking text messages with links to job info that I was sending to my employees). I used the ticketing system to get that problem fixed and they resolved it in a few days - I was under the impression it was kind of a complex problem too.

They also help us port numbers in from cell phones sometimes. And again the ticketing system is slow but they always get the problems resolved. None of these things being time sensitive, we were perfectly happy.

This type of thing is a difficult business problem for small and mid size businesses to solve. In this particular situation, I had a series of actions I was going to take to put out this particular fire. Normally I wouldn't do something like this, but my back was to the wall: * Call their sales number so I could plead my case to a real person within the company and have them put me in contact with someone * If that person refused - Call again and try with another sales person (This approach did not work because no one was answering the phone for sales, perhaps due to covid omicron?) * Post on HackerNews to see if I could get the attention of one of the brand ambassadors. (This worked, so I did not have to move on to the next steps) * Post on StackOverflow to see if I could get the attention of one of the brand ambassadors * Post on Reddit to see if I could get the attention of one of the brand ambassadors * Use LinkedIn to track down people who worked at Twilio. Use a paid service to get their phone numbers and addresses from their names. Call some of the people. * If no one answered the phone, go by the houses of Twilio employees who lived in my area

Long term, I wasn't sure what I would do because getting all the code switched to another provider would have been a huge hassle and it would have seriously gotten in the way of some of my other business development efforts. So I'm glad that Greg and Jeff reached out and reassured me that they don't intend to run their business this way.

A more difficult problem is Google and Facebook. I have had valuable pages stolen from me on both platforms (ex-employee) And neither company would engage with me. We're talking maybe $100,000 in lost property because of the amount of business the pages would bring in. Someone mentioned in another post on here that people are actually able to use HackerNews to get Google's attention. If I had known this I would have tried that. I knew Twilio might respond because they very often would help me when I posted technical questions on Stackoverflow in the past. I didn't think google and facebook cared as much about their brand because they have a monopoly.

I think you are right that it's not a valid use case anymore, even if they still assert that it is, because the reality is that it caused this problem. Even if they had responded to me immediately, my phones would have been shut down overnight.

Also, I was looking into the pricing a few months ago and its kind of expensive because I'm actually paying for two text messages: One for the incoming one, and one for the forwarded one.

The code has been working this way since maybe 2015, possibly before (its been so long, I can't remember). I've been using Twilio since I think 2010. I started out just doing call forwarding and later on added text messaging when customers started to expect to be able to text message us.

At the time, it was a core use case. There was a tutorial and everything "Forward text messages to your phone in a few lines of code".

Which pricing tier do you use? I've been thinking of starting with the for a while. Now we use a hodgepodge of Skype and WhatsApp

It needs to be human readable, so maybe pig latin instead

Oh no, I didn't take it that way. I just thought what you said was very interesting and wanted to provide more information and confirm that you were correct.

I agree.

Although this particular thing may have happened because they got backed into a corner by the carriers. They might have been forced to scramble and suspend a bunch of accounts in order to protect themselves from being suspended. It's possible this might not have been a gambit to save money, but something they were almost forced to do without time to properly prepare. I'm just speculating, guessing.

Yeah I think we're on the same page here. I mean its a complicated problem, they're under pressure to solve it. They were backed into a corner by the carriers and suspended my account. Shit happens.

They just need a phone number. I actually called sales hoping I could plead my case and get them to connect me with someone. But I couldn't get connected with sales. If this was due to omicron and sales would have helped me, then this is truly an edge case.

Yes I think you are right. But I don't think Twilio allows it unless I somehow register the number and authenticate that I own.

I could be wrong, but I think they have a way for me to register my cell number so I could "spoof" messages sent from it. But I would first have to prove to them that I own the number.

It might be possible to register numbers with them, but they still could get in trouble with the actual carrier of the cell number so it might not even matter.

I'd be really curious to know if this is what happened. Whats more interesting is he lives in Spain and his cell phone is on a Spanish carrier.

I also understand and agree with your argument about why they might have done what they did. But I still needed to counter with what I did in order to protect my business.

It's not an unauthenticated open relay.

It's like if you had a restaurant and you wanted to use Twilio. You might forward text messages sent to the restaurant number hosted on Twilio to your personal cell phone number.

Which provider did you end up using?

Oh I didn't even realize they had SMS. I was just thinking I could use push messages instead of SMS.

I read something about how Amazon was accidentally firing people in their warehouses due to an automated system. And the HR people in the warehouse didn't have the power to override it.

Ok so are you saying that Twilio cannot be used to rely messages from company phone numbers to employee cells phones?

I would understand if this was an edge case, but my understanding is this is a quite common and a core use case. I'm pretty sure this exact use case is in their basic tutorial.

I should clarify that these messages are being relayed internally to me and like two other people. It would not be possible for someone to use out software to spam people. We are not a SAAS provider. We are a local service company.

I'm going to guess that slack would not ban for this reason. It would not make sense at all.

You are really good at explaining these things.

Very often people say things that I know are incorrect and actually sound quite stupid, but then I am unable to articulate why. I was very surprised at the number of incorrect negative responses from people to this post, who seemed to grab onto details and then use them to twist reality.

How did you learn to dissect these arguments and then clearly refute them?

Also, I have never heard "distinction without difference" before, but it is a common way that people twist reality. Did you study logical fallacies? Or read a good book on how to deal with them?

Hey Jeff,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. The fact that you responded to this message at all resolves my initial concern, which had more to do with if I needed to change providers because of a cultural shift within your company. I understand that you are dealing with a very large and complex system that is changing quickly and will have problems, sometimes serious problems sometimes. Customer communication specifically is a very difficult and complex problem to solve at scale.

I actually spoke with one of the founders of Twilio when I first signed up. Evan maybe? He told me about how he studied cloud computing at MIT. This was a very long time ago.

Gregg was able to get the problem resolved within about 30 minutes once I reached out to him. He also provided me with a few solutions to prevent the problem in the future.

I understand the complicated problem that that led to this mistake and I think it is reasonable to make mistakes like this sometimes, especially if you're providers are threatening to suspend you.

The main problem that I would like you to solve is the lack of phone number. There needs to be a way for people to contact the company if there is an account administration emergency like this. Even chat would have been fine.

That being said, I did call sales and could not reach someone. If this is due to covid omicron and if normally I had called sales and would have been able to plead my case and gotten them to connect me with someone, I think that would have been fine and this truly is an edge case.

I'm going to have to cop to this. I was desperate and needed a way to get my phone calls up and running. I have many employees that rely on me to feed their families. We employ a lot of refugees with large families and if I don't run my business right, they can't feed their families. This isn't a game.

I posted to HackerNews because I suspected my issue would be seen and taken seriously if I did that. I could tell the ticketing system people were overlooked and only looking at my issue in a very shallow way.

If this had not worked, I would have started using my Stack-overflow account then Reddit. If that didn't work, I found an address of a lady how works for Twilio nearby, I was going to go knock on her door and see if she could put me in touch with someone.

Luckily I was able to get the problem resolved without those additional steps.

I would like to point out that Twilio's ticketing system works well for complex problems that are not time-sensitive. I had an issue a few months back that I think was probably quite complicated involving bureaucracy and multiple carriers and it was resolved in a few days via their ticketing system which was very cool.

Yeah GoDaddy and HostGator are like this.

Amazon EC2 is not.

Also Google treats businesses like this if they have profiles on their maps. A business might rely on their google maps profile for 100k+ in revenue, but they can't get someone from google on the phone to help deal with it. I had someone steal my google maps listing from me and they got away with it because google would not connect with me about it. It was horrible and it was wrong.

I think one of the key contexts here is being forgotten:

These are all internal messages. Someone cannot use our system to text random people. It's literally one person seeing them. We're a local service company. We're not SAAS or something like that. It's just people messaging us "Hey can you guys come Thursday?"

This would be like if you signed up for a VOIP provider for your business phones and they suspended your account because someone sent you a phishing text message.

Exactly. Also I should point out that we weren't sending spam. It's just relaying the messages that we receive internally.

I would think sending spam would be more if we allowed people to sign up for a our service and then people used it to send spam.

But these are all internal communications.

I'm already using a spam detection API. But remember those things don't block all spam.

Also, there are other ways to solve this specific problem given that they are intent on auto-suspending my account in this type of context. I could relay the messages using a different platform as an example.

Thats not really the point though. Me not paying for the spam API or not using it when I relay messages internally to employees is not a good reason to shut my whole business down and not give me a way to contact them. This should be obvious.

Yes, these are very good ideas. Didn't even think of the JPEG one, very cool!

UPDATE:::::

Due to Greg from Twilio seeing this post and providing me a way to reach out, I was able to get the problem resolved.

He spent about an hour on the phone with me today and provided some more information about the issue. A few highlights:

* Twilio has doubled in size since the beginning of the pandemic * Spamming and phishing through text message has gotten a lot more common very recently.

These two things together caused a sort of novel situation with them having to either auto-ban accounts of ban accounts with only a very shallow look and then not having a way for someone to get the account un-banned in a timely manner.

My initial concern with this post was that something had changed within the company culture where they were willing to cull off "smaller" accounts like mine in the $10,000 a year range by treating them very recklessly so that they only needed to work with very large companies which would be more simple and more profitable. This would mean that I would need to change providers or risk them doing other damaging things in the future that I would not be able to predict.

Based on a few things that Greg said in the conversation, I no longer believe this to be the case for a few reasons:

1) They have people like Greg reaching out to people like me at all. 2) In case Greg was not available the next time something like this happened, he provided me the contact information of some other people who were kind of high up in the company and explained that they would be very concerned that something like this was going on where legitimate customer accounts were being suspended.

This changed my interpretation of the situation because Greg's actions communicated to me that this is a temporary problem having to do with Twilio increasing in size very quickly at the same time spam and phishing became a big problem. They had to scramble to fix a problem with their providers before having a chance to refine their systems to make sure the implementation was done fairly and correctly. It does not seem to be a problem with top-level executives deciding that customers like me don't matter.

I also own a company and am very familiar with how things can get out of hand very quickly when demand increases. Shit hits the fan, then things suck for a while until the work is put in to become more organized. This takes time. And it takes trial and error.

I would expect over time for them to correct their systems and properly service smaller mid-range customers like me.

I did mitigate the problem last time. I communicated with them and they told me it was fine.

I'm very curious. Is this a communication mistake? Like do you think I'm some big company that forwards text messages to random people?

Do you understand these are text messages being sent to one of like 3 employees at my small company? We are not generating outbound content or allowing anyone else to do so. Your question about GDPR requests makes me think maybe you have misunderstood the context.

If you have correctly understood the context, do you actually think I should have some kind of AI algorithm scanning these messages for Phishing?

I'm not sure I understand what your are suggesting or how you would have solved this problem? You would have just turned off the text message forwarding I guess?

Is that how you solve problems? You see a problem, then you destroy the thing that caused the problem, so problem solved? What do you do for a living with that type of cognitive approach? Are you an entrepreneur? Do you really run a business with that attitude? Are you en engineer? If so, when you are asked to make something work, do you just tell your boss "no" if you run into a problem that requires a creative solution? Are you a lawyer? Is your job to tell people what thing they cannot do, but not to help people do new things? That would kind of make sense...

Oh very cool, thanks for this suggestion. I think the outgoing text messages actually add up to be kind of expensive too so this could save some money.

I need the message to pop up on his cell phone just in case he is not at the computer.

Slack is probably a good idea.

Of course we have an internal database and he can look at text messages through our web application too. But these are not push notifications to his phone.