14 ms·

How Twilio screwed us over

110 points by feint 16y ago

sahillavingia 16y ago
I'd like to hear Twilio's side of it; they seem like such a great company this feels... weird coming from there. I think there's more to this story. waits patiently
mayank 16y ago
Has anyone noticed an abundance of ranty blog posts (with authors who cannot distinguish between their/there) on HN lately? Here's the issue in brief: > The email from twilio informed me they had, without warning switched off all international SMS functionality. ...they were able to massively degrade the functionality of our app – an app which not only do people pay for, they rely on. Which I suppose is interesting enough, but then: > But when it comes what really matters, being able to offer my customers a reliable service, you need a written agreement. Which isn't exactly profound wisdom. If you're charging people for a service, you better make sure that you can hold your backend providers accountable for their end of the chain.
- feint 16y ago
  Absolutely. That's why I called myself foolish. I learned a lesson
- redstripe 16y ago
  Well, since they don't provide an SLA you can't really hold them accountable. Does that mean you shouldn't build services for which you charge money on top of twilio? Is twilio better suited to internal use rather than for building SaaS apps? These are serious matters.
  - wccrawford 16y ago
    If you give an SLA for your service, you had better have SLA all the way back down the chain. So yeah, it does mean that you shouldn't charge money for services built on Twilio (until they have an SLA) if you intend to provide reliable service yourself.
po 16y ago
Why did they switch off international SMS? What was the explanation they gave you? That seems like an important part of the story that you're missing.
- rmah 16y ago
  It doesn't matter why they shut it off. What matters is that they shut it off without any notice.
ajju 16y ago
Their current faq states that they don't deliver sms internationally. http://www.twilio.com/faq/international http://www.twilio.com/faq/international Based on that I presume they switched off the feature globally and not just for you. Correct? That doesn't mitigate your complaint.if anything, doing that without advance notice is worse. Did they provide any explanation in the email? Twilio has between a very reliable provider in my experience so far, so this is worrisome.
jeffiel 16y ago
Just posted this on Anthony's blog, but thought I would post it here as well: -- Hi Anthony, I'm sorry that you feel we were't straight forward, although our goal was to be completely transparent in our communication with you about the status of this feature. Since the time of launch, we thought we had clearly messaged that international SMS has been an unsupported feature, and that the entire product was in beta status. We had published this fact on our SMS product FAQs, as well as in the public GetSatisfaction forums. Our apologies that we weren't clear enough about that fact, which caused you to roll international SMS features into your app. We do pride ourselves on putting developers and their applications first, and in being open in our communications, product capabilities and limitations. Please feel free to email me at jeff@twilio.com, I'm always open to feedback, questions, comments or concern. Sincerely, Jeff Lawson Co-Founder & CEO Twilio.com
- redstripe 16y ago
  Is there a page that lists all the beta features that may become unsupported without warning in the future?
  - Tws 16y ago
    Probably not. He implies that nearly everything is beta, and thus their incompetent and unprofessional management team feel free to disable functionality with zero notice. Only a moron would trust a company that's run as poorly as twill. Fortunately for twill, there ares a lot of inexperienced devs who see the easy API and are too inexperienced to realiE that only a complete moron would trust a company that thinks zero warning shutoffs are acceptable, even on beta features. This is the predictable result of ycs campaign against business education, and drive to get less and less experience.
- mariorz 16y ago
  Hi Jeff, I had the same problem. It was not very clear from your pages or FAQs that international SMS was not supported. Now I see it's been made very clear in this page http://www.twilio.com/faq/international http://www.twilio.com/faq/international, that's great, the previous message was confusing to say the least. FWIW I complained about this on the getsatisfaction forums some two weeks ago http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/international_sms-1591m?utm_content=reply_link&utm_medium=email&utm_source=reply_notification#reply_3550891 http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/international_sms-1... Fortunately I don't have a live app that depended on your service, so all it cost me was $50 deposited to start playing around.
grigory 16y ago
This is worrying. We're using Twilio in my app - they've been good to us so far, certainly very friendly and helpful. The service has been spotty at times, but mostly reliable. Most of our customers are based in U.S./Canada, and all paying customers are; we also had a backup SMS delivery built recently. However, providing absolutely no notice (didn't seem like I missed an email from them) of such a significant change in service certainly isn't a good way to go about this.
emcooke 16y ago
For those wondering about the technical aspects of this decision take a look at this thread: http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/international_sms-1591m http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/international_sms-1... When we launched the Twilio SMS Beta we tried hard to support sending SMS messages to both US and International destinations. When there were problems, we worked with our customers to collect forensic data on hundreds of carriers worldwide and pass it to our carriers partners to debug. At Twilio we are dedicated to working with top quality carriers and technology. After months of working to fix problems, were not able to deliver the reliable International SMS service our customers have come to expect. We apologize for any problems this has caused for our customer and we'll work to bring back International SMS service after were able to deliver on the quality we do the rest of Twilio services. Cheers, -Evan CTO and Co-Founder
- feint 16y ago
  That's fine. In fact it's a good move. But why email me after the fact. It's like you brlirve its ok to communicate with paying customers like that.
  - emcooke 16y ago
    Hi Anthony, Twilio service status available via our public status page http://status.twilio.com/ http://status.twilio.com/ We communicated degraded international SMS service to customers on August 16. You bring up a good point that the information might not be readily discoverable. We'll work to make the status page more findable and to extend the API (http://status.twilio.com/documentation/rest http://status.twilio.com/documentation/rest) with features such as RSS to let customer subscribe up-to-the-minute status information.
    - feint 16y ago
      Or. Just email me before you cut a feature next time.
      - davemc500hats 16y ago
nakajima 16y ago
As a heavy user of twilio (I work at groupme.com, we're entirely text message based, and built entirely on twilio), I'll say that every time we've broached the topic of international SMS, they've always cautioned us that it's experimental, and so we've explicitly marked our product as such (USA only for now). That's not to say that we don't want international bad, but we pretty much trust their judgement as to whether or not they say a product is ready or if it ain't. Twilio does good work, and they're amazingly responsive to developer requests/feedback.
rokhayakebe 16y ago
It's 11:24 in phoenix. I just finished a 6 hour sprint working on an app that will rely 100% of the Twilio api, so the headline caught my attention. By the time I came back both the CEO and CTO gave an explanation and apologized. I can respect that. I hope Task.fm gets back on track as well. Edit: J, maybe reimbursing him would not hurt.
- Tws 16y ago
  Conrrwtulations on creating a massive single point of failure in your application, and one that can fail due to many reasons. Here is to hoping that their obviously inexperienced technical and management teams don't screw you up, that they don't run out of money, and that they don't otherwise change anything you need.
feint 16y ago
For the record - I should have said this in the original post, I like twilio. I liked their business model and I really liked the product. I had multiple email conversations with twilio team members over the past year and "caution" wasn't something I would say was strongly portrayed
deleted 16y ago
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grease 16y ago
Just curious, what are the alternatives to Twilio in case some one wants to send out SMS across countries?
- MortenK 16y ago
  www.tropo.com and www.teleku.com does both international voice and SMS I believe. There's also www.cloudvox.com, but I'm unsure if they also support international.
  - akalsey 16y ago
    Yes, Tropo does international voice and SMS. We've got numbers in 36 countries and speech recognition in 9 langauges. If you buy a number from us outside the US, we can't do SMS on that yet, but we're working on it. In the meantime, feel free to send texts to and from anywhere from your US number. We won't even charge you any extra for the international sending. Teleku is now owned by Tropo and as such can do international SMS as well. CloudVox doesn't do SMS worldwide, but I was talking to one of their founders recently and he mentioned they're working on it.
- points 16y ago
  Google for "bulk sms international". There are hundreds of them.
abraham 16y ago
From the Google Cache of Twilio's International FAQ: > You may send SMS from a Twilio number to an international number and find that it works. However, this is an unsupported feature and service outside the US may change at any time. Can't get much clearer then that. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:http://www.twilio.com/faq/international http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- csmeder 16y ago
  Well it would have been clearer if it said: However, this is an unsupported feature and service outside the US may change at any time WITH OUT WARNING. The reason he is upset is that Twilio didn't give him a warning window.
  - donohoe 16y ago
    The wording could be better, but the intent is very clear. Twilo is still ok in my book.
- dmor 16y ago
  I want to chime in here, because this thread is painful for me to read. We are developers, we work with dozens of APIs on a daily basis, and we work really hard to help developers succeed. I just want to lay out what we're currently doing to achieve our goal of being one of the most accessible API companies in the world, and encourage you to tell us what we can do better. Right now we communicate status via our API, documentation, FAQs, forums, and social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and IRC chat. We can also be reached by email 24/7 as well as over the phone from 7am to 7pm Pacific Time. Finally, we publish the status of all our services at status.twilio.com In the case of international SMS, we saw high rates of undeliverable messages starting on August 16th and we have communicated this via our status page, forums, and email support channel. When it became clear to us that we wouldn't be able to restore service, we emailed customers who were impacted (yesterday) to let them know. While the service hadn't been working for awhile, people were checking back with us regularly, and we wanted to keep them in the loop so they could find new providers if needed. As others have noted here, international SMS is very hard, we're trying to be open and keep everybody in the loop. We're very sorry for any trouble this has caused. You can always reach me at danielle@twilio.com
mahmud 16y ago
I invite the author to sample the basket of shit that is SMS delivering services out there before complaining about Twilio. We have paid for an "SDK" with one provider, they came to our office and installed a hardware device which we also had to buy, and they still can't manage to deliver 10% of our messages. That was in Australia. After that mess, I personally wrote Twilio a letter asking them if I can help them establish themselves in Aus and the Middle East; which they declined, saying they were getting around to it themselves, which is good. Bottom line: I would chalk this up as a slight oversight by a bunch of very capable, if very busy people, bless their heart. They are one decision away from being fucked over by Skype and Google, if those two ever decide to compete with them. So I am rooting for our kids, even if they have to make gut-wrenching decisions like this on the spot. Remember, just a year and a half ago they were nothing but a RESTful URL that accepted a few XML messages. They have come a long way, imo.
- paraschopra 16y ago
  In India, the SMS deliverability is very good. Thanks to fierce competition between "bulk-sms" companies. I personally use a simple, non-nonsense service http://smsplatter.com/ http://smsplatter.com/ and have been lucky enough to get mission-critical alerts (from servers) delivered every single time.
- statictype 16y ago
  Couldn't you just use a gsm modem connected to some computer with a sim card in it?
  - mahmud 16y ago
    Sure, if it came with an SLA, had a support number or someone to hold responsible. We're programmers, we're hired not to do everything ourselves.
  - viraptor 16y ago
    That only kind of works... Actually, once when we needed to deliver many messages, we tried to get 6 usb gsm dongles. Then we discovered that you can overload 1 gsm transmitter with 6 standard dongles - maybe the equipment was just weird in some way, but at some point messages simply started to be rejected. Another problem is the delay - you need ~4s to get an acknowledgement which seriously limits the throughput. Then there are other problems with mass-sending... there is one 8-bit counter, but I can't remember now for which functionality (either replies, or delivery confirmations), which killed the idea in the end (it was supposed to be mass-notification, so thousands of texts / hour). Just find someone who provides smpp gateways and save yourself the pain...
jacquesm 16y ago
SMS is the ugly step-child of international communications, a thing that should cost $0, and should be easy has been made in to a nightmare to deploy and a patchwork of carrier related troubles. I can fully understand their decision to go US only for now, but I really hope that at some point they'll be able to roll this out reliably world-wide, that alone would lay the world literally at their feet. So many services are now hard to impossible to implement because there is no easy way of doing this, in my own site I would have several applications for it right away but only if I can guarantee international delivery.
- thibaut_barrere 16y ago
  Someone I worked for a while back is currently building this: http://nexmo.com/ http://nexmo.com/ May be interesting to keep bookmarked (I don't write SMS-enabled apps myself).
- points 16y ago
  There are so many other SMS providers, with cool APIs, that send internationally without any issues. I used one such service from 2000 or so when I ran a ringtone website. It's a solved problem. Just search Google for "bulk sms gateway" etc and you'll find literally hundreds of providers with various APIs and so on.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    I've tried a few over the years, and I've yet to find one that can actually deliver on a service level agreement, would you mind sharing which companies you have good experiences with?
    - mattew 16y ago
      I work with a mobile marketing company that uses OpenMarket as their SMS hub, and I have been quite pleased with them so far. They provide a consistent API and callback feature for sms that bridges over to the mobile networks.
    - points 16y ago
martinkallstrom 16y ago
This is an important lesson for any startup. Don't rely on free services, insist that you pay for them and set up an agreement. But it is also a lesson from the other end. Twilio would probably not have done this lightly. By not offering agreements for there free service, they had the option of choosing to disappointing their users instead of loosing what might be a lot of money. It's never the easiest decision but it in some cases it is the best option.
- feint 16y ago
  Free service? This wasn't a free sevice. I was a paying customer
  - martinkallstrom 16y ago
    My bad for reading the post wrong in this regard.
JonM 16y ago
I was wanting to use Twilio for UK SMS sending but the system couldn't send to my own mobile. I emailed again a few weeks back and it was still "unsupported". I'm glad it didn't work on my own mobile as I would have definitely integrated it into my site and no doubt run into the same huge problem here!
lovskogen 16y ago
Off topic, but the text-shadow 1px #fff really strained my eyes while reading on a iPhone 3G.
deleted 16y ago
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drivebyacct2 16y ago
s/there/their
bond 16y ago
So Twilio as an unsupported service which they charge others for it. They choose to close the service and don't have the courtesy to inform users before that and now say the service was beta/unsupported and they are sorry for it? That's really lame... They have the obligation to inform users they're going to close a service, whether it's beta or not. The answers they gave is not the way to do it, giving an excuse because the service was unsupported and completely ignoring their fault in warning their users shows that they don't give a damn about the users. There's nothing wrong in coming here and apologize for not giving a warning before closing the service, but they choose not to do it...
- jacquesm 16y ago
  They already did, and 6 hours before you posted this. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726444 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726444
  - bond 16y ago
    No they didn't: "I'm sorry that you feel we were't straight forward, although our goal was to be completely transparent in our communication with you about the status of this feature. Since the time of launch, we thought we had clearly messaged that international SMS has been an unsupported feature, and that the entire product was in beta status. We had published this fact on our SMS product FAQs, as well as in the public GetSatisfaction forums. Our apologies that we weren't clear enough about that fact, which caused you to roll international SMS features into your app." This is not an apology for not informing the developer before closing the service...
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      Just quoting what you quoted: "Our apologies that we weren't clear enough about that fact, which caused you to roll international SMS features into your app." Reads like an apology to me. Read on for a bit, they acknowledge that their communications were lacking and have improved on that by making it easier to find this information. What do you expect of them? Groveling? A refund?
nomous 16y ago
(cross posting my comment from his blog) Sorry buddy; your post is basically a hit piece about an experimental service which stopped working. It seems they sent out an email and marked it on their status page. So I'm going to categorize you with the other startup people who have pretty blog and hurt feelings for your own mistakes. I hope I never do business with people like you.
alttab 16y ago
This retort to Twilio is just as unprofessional as their "poor service." As others have pointed out, SMS is an unsupported feature and service outside the US can change at any time. So in conclusion, apart from twilio losing one of there early adopters (task.fm isn’t a big customer, but that doesn’t mean we can be screwed over) they are also damaging there brand. They used to be all about developers. I think only getting miffed that your OWN service wasn't perfect and then posting to HN about how task.fm was "screwed over" is more damaging to twilio (is it?) than an SMS outage. The author didn't read Twilio's own SLA and hardened entrepreneurs don't burn bridges publicly everytime something goes wrong. I know trying to build an awesome web application is hard and its frustrating when supporting services go down, but that is the nature of our beast. We build on top of each other, so we must respect and support each other. Getting mad and cutting off your own hand because you are angry isn't helping build anything. Google's API has bugs that my start-ups web application runs into all the time. Sometimes they change API behavior, which the visualization screws up the entire UI in the process. This effects thousands of our users and we have to release work-arounds as fast as we can. But I don't blame Google - it was our choice to use their APIs. Generally, this sort of thing will continue to happen with all web service APIs. As a community of developers, I would ask them why it happened and provide constructive feedback about how important it was. You might just find they'll listen and you'll have more pull. Great start-ups have a short list of early adopters or engaged users that they trust and continually go back to for product advice. Writing a post like this pulls the rug out from under your own service because you refuse to use it, it will cost you more, and twilio will suffer from lack of valuable constructive feeback. Really just my POV, but hopefully you'll find why posting inflamatory articles like this only hurts entrepreneurs and our community at large. At most it sets an example of how we treat each other.
- rmah 16y ago
  Heh, you can't really hold up Google as a paragon of developer relations or customer service. They have a pretty poor reputation on both counts.
markkat 16y ago
That is really too bad all around. The state of SMS is ridiculous. We go through a gateway. Certification was painfully slow, and the cost... OMFG the cost of a text. -It's as if the alphanumerals had to be mined, shipped, refined, and then placed into each message by hand. I applaud Twilio for what they are trying to do. IMO, they are playing interference for an ugly beast.
ajays 16y ago
Presumably, Twilio knows who their top users of the international SMS feature are. Why not just look at the logs and email the top users, telling them the service is going to be discontinued? This isn't rocket science, people.
knodi 16y ago
Check out Moonshado SMS on heroku addons for International SMS, it works great for and its so damn cheap.
- friendstock 16y ago
  that's good to hear... we will try it
jscore 16y ago
That blog post should've been summarized with one sentence. "dont trust twilio because they turned off intl sms without warning"
teljamou 16y ago
I have founded Nexmo.com, Low Cost SMS API (in private beta), early this year after spending 7 years in the Wholesale SMS industry. Delivering awesome SMS service on a global scale is tricky – but it should not be! We just finalised building our back-end SMS network. Here are some challenges the industry faces: ———————————————————- -Many intermediaries to reach end-users: Between an App and an end-user you can get up to 4 or 5 intermediaries operating their own infrastructure. Adding intermediaries not only increases cost but also exponentially reduces quality – QOS is measured in terms of availability, delivery ratios, speed, features supported, etc… Ask your provider about their sourcing strategy? Who do they buy from? Do they have a strict policy in terms of suppliers’ selection? Can they share delivery ratios? -SLA does not really matter: What if the providers of your provider do not guarantee any SLA? A provider can potentially guarantee an SLA on its own infrastructure but can’t control what happens afterwards. -Non transparent fees: Customers get charged on SMS sent to networks that are not or poorly covered but listed as LIVE in the provider’s reach list – even when you sign a written agreement. -Tricky to reach all Networks: Some networks in the world are tricky to reach and sometimes the only reliable way to deliver SMS is to connect directly. Other are installing SMS filters to cut certain type of traffic (e.g. Spam). For instance, if your provider mentions networks such as Comcell Colombia or IAM in Morocco, you’d rather check again because these networks are impossible to reach with full feature support/reliable service without direct connections. Currently there are at least 26 networks that are tricky to reach and 22 that are filtering. Another rule of thumb is to check whether in Europe their prices are above $0.055, since European Wireless Carriers (also applicable to other regions/countries) require a termination cost for reliable SMS routes. If below that price, it could mean that your provider (or the provider of your provider!) is using unsolicited routes that are not reliable/has limited life time. ——————————————————————————————————— Delivering hassle free (and Low Cost!) global SMS termination is not obvious but we are working on it :) Tony Jamous twitter: @nexmo e-mail: tony.jamous [@] nexmo.com

110 points by feint 16y ago

I'd like to hear Twilio's side of it; they seem like such a great company this feels... weird coming from there. I think there's more to this story. waits patiently

mayank 16y ago

Has anyone noticed an abundance of ranty blog posts (with authors who cannot distinguish between their/there) on HN lately? Here's the issue in brief: > The email from twilio informed me they had, without warning switched off all international SMS functionality. ...they were able to massively degrade the functionality of our app – an app which not only do people pay for, they rely on. Which I suppose is interesting enough, but then: > But when it comes what really matters, being able to offer my customers a reliable service, you need a written agreement. Which isn't exactly profound wisdom. If you're charging people for a service, you better make sure that you can hold your backend providers accountable for their end of the chain.

feint 16y ago
Absolutely. That's why I called myself foolish. I learned a lesson
redstripe 16y ago
Well, since they don't provide an SLA you can't really hold them accountable. Does that mean you shouldn't build services for which you charge money on top of twilio? Is twilio better suited to internal use rather than for building SaaS apps? These are serious matters.
- wccrawford 16y ago
  If you give an SLA for your service, you had better have SLA all the way back down the chain. So yeah, it does mean that you shouldn't charge money for services built on Twilio (until they have an SLA) if you intend to provide reliable service yourself.

po 16y ago

Why did they switch off international SMS? What was the explanation they gave you? That seems like an important part of the story that you're missing.

rmah 16y ago
It doesn't matter why they shut it off. What matters is that they shut it off without any notice.

ajju 16y ago

Their current faq states that they don't deliver sms internationally. http://www.twilio.com/faq/international http://www.twilio.com/faq/international Based on that I presume they switched off the feature globally and not just for you. Correct? That doesn't mitigate your complaint.if anything, doing that without advance notice is worse. Did they provide any explanation in the email? Twilio has between a very reliable provider in my experience so far, so this is worrisome.

jeffiel 16y ago

Just posted this on Anthony's blog, but thought I would post it here as well: -- Hi Anthony, I'm sorry that you feel we were't straight forward, although our goal was to be completely transparent in our communication with you about the status of this feature. Since the time of launch, we thought we had clearly messaged that international SMS has been an unsupported feature, and that the entire product was in beta status. We had published this fact on our SMS product FAQs, as well as in the public GetSatisfaction forums. Our apologies that we weren't clear enough about that fact, which caused you to roll international SMS features into your app. We do pride ourselves on putting developers and their applications first, and in being open in our communications, product capabilities and limitations. Please feel free to email me at jeff@twilio.com, I'm always open to feedback, questions, comments or concern. Sincerely, Jeff Lawson Co-Founder & CEO Twilio.com

redstripe 16y ago
Is there a page that lists all the beta features that may become unsupported without warning in the future?
- Tws 16y ago
  Probably not. He implies that nearly everything is beta, and thus their incompetent and unprofessional management team feel free to disable functionality with zero notice. Only a moron would trust a company that's run as poorly as twill. Fortunately for twill, there ares a lot of inexperienced devs who see the easy API and are too inexperienced to realiE that only a complete moron would trust a company that thinks zero warning shutoffs are acceptable, even on beta features. This is the predictable result of ycs campaign against business education, and drive to get less and less experience.
mariorz 16y ago
Hi Jeff, I had the same problem. It was not very clear from your pages or FAQs that international SMS was not supported. Now I see it's been made very clear in this page http://www.twilio.com/faq/international http://www.twilio.com/faq/international, that's great, the previous message was confusing to say the least. FWIW I complained about this on the getsatisfaction forums some two weeks ago http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/international_sms-1591m?utm_content=reply_link&utm_medium=email&utm_source=reply_notification#reply_3550891 http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/international_sms-1... Fortunately I don't have a live app that depended on your service, so all it cost me was $50 deposited to start playing around.

grigory 16y ago

This is worrying. We're using Twilio in my app - they've been good to us so far, certainly very friendly and helpful. The service has been spotty at times, but mostly reliable. Most of our customers are based in U.S./Canada, and all paying customers are; we also had a backup SMS delivery built recently. However, providing absolutely no notice (didn't seem like I missed an email from them) of such a significant change in service certainly isn't a good way to go about this.

emcooke 16y ago

For those wondering about the technical aspects of this decision take a look at this thread: http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/international_sms-1591m http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/international_sms-1... When we launched the Twilio SMS Beta we tried hard to support sending SMS messages to both US and International destinations. When there were problems, we worked with our customers to collect forensic data on hundreds of carriers worldwide and pass it to our carriers partners to debug. At Twilio we are dedicated to working with top quality carriers and technology. After months of working to fix problems, were not able to deliver the reliable International SMS service our customers have come to expect. We apologize for any problems this has caused for our customer and we'll work to bring back International SMS service after were able to deliver on the quality we do the rest of Twilio services. Cheers, -Evan CTO and Co-Founder

feint 16y ago
That's fine. In fact it's a good move. But why email me after the fact. It's like you brlirve its ok to communicate with paying customers like that.
- emcooke 16y ago
  Hi Anthony, Twilio service status available via our public status page http://status.twilio.com/ http://status.twilio.com/ We communicated degraded international SMS service to customers on August 16. You bring up a good point that the information might not be readily discoverable. We'll work to make the status page more findable and to extend the API (http://status.twilio.com/documentation/rest http://status.twilio.com/documentation/rest) with features such as RSS to let customer subscribe up-to-the-minute status information.
  - feint 16y ago
    Or. Just email me before you cut a feature next time.
    - davemc500hats 16y ago

nakajima 16y ago

As a heavy user of twilio (I work at groupme.com, we're entirely text message based, and built entirely on twilio), I'll say that every time we've broached the topic of international SMS, they've always cautioned us that it's experimental, and so we've explicitly marked our product as such (USA only for now). That's not to say that we don't want international bad, but we pretty much trust their judgement as to whether or not they say a product is ready or if it ain't. Twilio does good work, and they're amazingly responsive to developer requests/feedback.

rokhayakebe 16y ago

It's 11:24 in phoenix. I just finished a 6 hour sprint working on an app that will rely 100% of the Twilio api, so the headline caught my attention. By the time I came back both the CEO and CTO gave an explanation and apologized. I can respect that. I hope Task.fm gets back on track as well. Edit: J, maybe reimbursing him would not hurt.

Tws 16y ago
Conrrwtulations on creating a massive single point of failure in your application, and one that can fail due to many reasons. Here is to hoping that their obviously inexperienced technical and management teams don't screw you up, that they don't run out of money, and that they don't otherwise change anything you need.

feint 16y ago

For the record - I should have said this in the original post, I like twilio. I liked their business model and I really liked the product. I had multiple email conversations with twilio team members over the past year and "caution" wasn't something I would say was strongly portrayed

deleted 16y ago

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grease 16y ago

Just curious, what are the alternatives to Twilio in case some one wants to send out SMS across countries?

MortenK 16y ago
www.tropo.com and www.teleku.com does both international voice and SMS I believe. There's also www.cloudvox.com, but I'm unsure if they also support international.
- akalsey 16y ago
  Yes, Tropo does international voice and SMS. We've got numbers in 36 countries and speech recognition in 9 langauges. If you buy a number from us outside the US, we can't do SMS on that yet, but we're working on it. In the meantime, feel free to send texts to and from anywhere from your US number. We won't even charge you any extra for the international sending. Teleku is now owned by Tropo and as such can do international SMS as well. CloudVox doesn't do SMS worldwide, but I was talking to one of their founders recently and he mentioned they're working on it.
points 16y ago
Google for "bulk sms international". There are hundreds of them.

abraham 16y ago

From the Google Cache of Twilio's International FAQ: > You may send SMS from a Twilio number to an international number and find that it works. However, this is an unsupported feature and service outside the US may change at any time. Can't get much clearer then that. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:http://www.twilio.com/faq/international http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...

deleted 16y ago
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csmeder 16y ago
Well it would have been clearer if it said: However, this is an unsupported feature and service outside the US may change at any time WITH OUT WARNING. The reason he is upset is that Twilio didn't give him a warning window.
- donohoe 16y ago
  The wording could be better, but the intent is very clear. Twilo is still ok in my book.
dmor 16y ago
I want to chime in here, because this thread is painful for me to read. We are developers, we work with dozens of APIs on a daily basis, and we work really hard to help developers succeed. I just want to lay out what we're currently doing to achieve our goal of being one of the most accessible API companies in the world, and encourage you to tell us what we can do better. Right now we communicate status via our API, documentation, FAQs, forums, and social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and IRC chat. We can also be reached by email 24/7 as well as over the phone from 7am to 7pm Pacific Time. Finally, we publish the status of all our services at status.twilio.com In the case of international SMS, we saw high rates of undeliverable messages starting on August 16th and we have communicated this via our status page, forums, and email support channel. When it became clear to us that we wouldn't be able to restore service, we emailed customers who were impacted (yesterday) to let them know. While the service hadn't been working for awhile, people were checking back with us regularly, and we wanted to keep them in the loop so they could find new providers if needed. As others have noted here, international SMS is very hard, we're trying to be open and keep everybody in the loop. We're very sorry for any trouble this has caused. You can always reach me at danielle@twilio.com

mahmud 16y ago

I invite the author to sample the basket of shit that is SMS delivering services out there before complaining about Twilio. We have paid for an "SDK" with one provider, they came to our office and installed a hardware device which we also had to buy, and they still can't manage to deliver 10% of our messages. That was in Australia. After that mess, I personally wrote Twilio a letter asking them if I can help them establish themselves in Aus and the Middle East; which they declined, saying they were getting around to it themselves, which is good. Bottom line: I would chalk this up as a slight oversight by a bunch of very capable, if very busy people, bless their heart. They are one decision away from being fucked over by Skype and Google, if those two ever decide to compete with them. So I am rooting for our kids, even if they have to make gut-wrenching decisions like this on the spot. Remember, just a year and a half ago they were nothing but a RESTful URL that accepted a few XML messages. They have come a long way, imo.

paraschopra 16y ago
In India, the SMS deliverability is very good. Thanks to fierce competition between "bulk-sms" companies. I personally use a simple, non-nonsense service http://smsplatter.com/ http://smsplatter.com/ and have been lucky enough to get mission-critical alerts (from servers) delivered every single time.
statictype 16y ago
Couldn't you just use a gsm modem connected to some computer with a sim card in it?
- mahmud 16y ago
  Sure, if it came with an SLA, had a support number or someone to hold responsible. We're programmers, we're hired not to do everything ourselves.
- viraptor 16y ago
  That only kind of works... Actually, once when we needed to deliver many messages, we tried to get 6 usb gsm dongles. Then we discovered that you can overload 1 gsm transmitter with 6 standard dongles - maybe the equipment was just weird in some way, but at some point messages simply started to be rejected. Another problem is the delay - you need ~4s to get an acknowledgement which seriously limits the throughput. Then there are other problems with mass-sending... there is one 8-bit counter, but I can't remember now for which functionality (either replies, or delivery confirmations), which killed the idea in the end (it was supposed to be mass-notification, so thousands of texts / hour). Just find someone who provides smpp gateways and save yourself the pain...

jacquesm 16y ago

SMS is the ugly step-child of international communications, a thing that should cost $0, and should be easy has been made in to a nightmare to deploy and a patchwork of carrier related troubles. I can fully understand their decision to go US only for now, but I really hope that at some point they'll be able to roll this out reliably world-wide, that alone would lay the world literally at their feet. So many services are now hard to impossible to implement because there is no easy way of doing this, in my own site I would have several applications for it right away but only if I can guarantee international delivery.

thibaut_barrere 16y ago
Someone I worked for a while back is currently building this: http://nexmo.com/ http://nexmo.com/ May be interesting to keep bookmarked (I don't write SMS-enabled apps myself).
points 16y ago
There are so many other SMS providers, with cool APIs, that send internationally without any issues. I used one such service from 2000 or so when I ran a ringtone website. It's a solved problem. Just search Google for "bulk sms gateway" etc and you'll find literally hundreds of providers with various APIs and so on.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  I've tried a few over the years, and I've yet to find one that can actually deliver on a service level agreement, would you mind sharing which companies you have good experiences with?
  - mattew 16y ago
    I work with a mobile marketing company that uses OpenMarket as their SMS hub, and I have been quite pleased with them so far. They provide a consistent API and callback feature for sms that bridges over to the mobile networks.
  - points 16y ago

martinkallstrom 16y ago

This is an important lesson for any startup. Don't rely on free services, insist that you pay for them and set up an agreement. But it is also a lesson from the other end. Twilio would probably not have done this lightly. By not offering agreements for there free service, they had the option of choosing to disappointing their users instead of loosing what might be a lot of money. It's never the easiest decision but it in some cases it is the best option.

feint 16y ago
Free service? This wasn't a free sevice. I was a paying customer
- martinkallstrom 16y ago
  My bad for reading the post wrong in this regard.

JonM 16y ago

I was wanting to use Twilio for UK SMS sending but the system couldn't send to my own mobile. I emailed again a few weeks back and it was still "unsupported". I'm glad it didn't work on my own mobile as I would have definitely integrated it into my site and no doubt run into the same huge problem here!

lovskogen 16y ago

Off topic, but the text-shadow 1px #fff really strained my eyes while reading on a iPhone 3G.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

drivebyacct2 16y ago

s/there/their

bond 16y ago

So Twilio as an unsupported service which they charge others for it. They choose to close the service and don't have the courtesy to inform users before that and now say the service was beta/unsupported and they are sorry for it? That's really lame... They have the obligation to inform users they're going to close a service, whether it's beta or not. The answers they gave is not the way to do it, giving an excuse because the service was unsupported and completely ignoring their fault in warning their users shows that they don't give a damn about the users. There's nothing wrong in coming here and apologize for not giving a warning before closing the service, but they choose not to do it...

jacquesm 16y ago
They already did, and 6 hours before you posted this. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726444 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726444
- bond 16y ago
  No they didn't: "I'm sorry that you feel we were't straight forward, although our goal was to be completely transparent in our communication with you about the status of this feature. Since the time of launch, we thought we had clearly messaged that international SMS has been an unsupported feature, and that the entire product was in beta status. We had published this fact on our SMS product FAQs, as well as in the public GetSatisfaction forums. Our apologies that we weren't clear enough about that fact, which caused you to roll international SMS features into your app." This is not an apology for not informing the developer before closing the service...
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Just quoting what you quoted: "Our apologies that we weren't clear enough about that fact, which caused you to roll international SMS features into your app." Reads like an apology to me. Read on for a bit, they acknowledge that their communications were lacking and have improved on that by making it easier to find this information. What do you expect of them? Groveling? A refund?

nomous 16y ago

(cross posting my comment from his blog) Sorry buddy; your post is basically a hit piece about an experimental service which stopped working. It seems they sent out an email and marked it on their status page. So I'm going to categorize you with the other startup people who have pretty blog and hurt feelings for your own mistakes. I hope I never do business with people like you.

alttab 16y ago

This retort to Twilio is just as unprofessional as their "poor service." As others have pointed out, SMS is an unsupported feature and service outside the US can change at any time. So in conclusion, apart from twilio losing one of there early adopters (task.fm isn’t a big customer, but that doesn’t mean we can be screwed over) they are also damaging there brand. They used to be all about developers. I think only getting miffed that your OWN service wasn't perfect and then posting to HN about how task.fm was "screwed over" is more damaging to twilio (is it?) than an SMS outage. The author didn't read Twilio's own SLA and hardened entrepreneurs don't burn bridges publicly everytime something goes wrong. I know trying to build an awesome web application is hard and its frustrating when supporting services go down, but that is the nature of our beast. We build on top of each other, so we must respect and support each other. Getting mad and cutting off your own hand because you are angry isn't helping build anything. Google's API has bugs that my start-ups web application runs into all the time. Sometimes they change API behavior, which the visualization screws up the entire UI in the process. This effects thousands of our users and we have to release work-arounds as fast as we can. But I don't blame Google - it was our choice to use their APIs. Generally, this sort of thing will continue to happen with all web service APIs. As a community of developers, I would ask them why it happened and provide constructive feedback about how important it was. You might just find they'll listen and you'll have more pull. Great start-ups have a short list of early adopters or engaged users that they trust and continually go back to for product advice. Writing a post like this pulls the rug out from under your own service because you refuse to use it, it will cost you more, and twilio will suffer from lack of valuable constructive feeback. Really just my POV, but hopefully you'll find why posting inflamatory articles like this only hurts entrepreneurs and our community at large. At most it sets an example of how we treat each other.

rmah 16y ago
Heh, you can't really hold up Google as a paragon of developer relations or customer service. They have a pretty poor reputation on both counts.

markkat 16y ago

That is really too bad all around. The state of SMS is ridiculous. We go through a gateway. Certification was painfully slow, and the cost... OMFG the cost of a text. -It's as if the alphanumerals had to be mined, shipped, refined, and then placed into each message by hand. I applaud Twilio for what they are trying to do. IMO, they are playing interference for an ugly beast.

ajays 16y ago

Presumably, Twilio knows who their top users of the international SMS feature are. Why not just look at the logs and email the top users, telling them the service is going to be discontinued? This isn't rocket science, people.

knodi 16y ago

Check out Moonshado SMS on heroku addons for International SMS, it works great for and its so damn cheap.

friendstock 16y ago
that's good to hear... we will try it

jscore 16y ago

That blog post should've been summarized with one sentence. "dont trust twilio because they turned off intl sms without warning"

teljamou 16y ago

I have founded Nexmo.com, Low Cost SMS API (in private beta), early this year after spending 7 years in the Wholesale SMS industry. Delivering awesome SMS service on a global scale is tricky – but it should not be! We just finalised building our back-end SMS network. Here are some challenges the industry faces: ———————————————————- -Many intermediaries to reach end-users: Between an App and an end-user you can get up to 4 or 5 intermediaries operating their own infrastructure. Adding intermediaries not only increases cost but also exponentially reduces quality – QOS is measured in terms of availability, delivery ratios, speed, features supported, etc… Ask your provider about their sourcing strategy? Who do they buy from? Do they have a strict policy in terms of suppliers’ selection? Can they share delivery ratios? -SLA does not really matter: What if the providers of your provider do not guarantee any SLA? A provider can potentially guarantee an SLA on its own infrastructure but can’t control what happens afterwards. -Non transparent fees: Customers get charged on SMS sent to networks that are not or poorly covered but listed as LIVE in the provider’s reach list – even when you sign a written agreement. -Tricky to reach all Networks: Some networks in the world are tricky to reach and sometimes the only reliable way to deliver SMS is to connect directly. Other are installing SMS filters to cut certain type of traffic (e.g. Spam). For instance, if your provider mentions networks such as Comcell Colombia or IAM in Morocco, you’d rather check again because these networks are impossible to reach with full feature support/reliable service without direct connections. Currently there are at least 26 networks that are tricky to reach and 22 that are filtering. Another rule of thumb is to check whether in Europe their prices are above $0.055, since European Wireless Carriers (also applicable to other regions/countries) require a termination cost for reliable SMS routes. If below that price, it could mean that your provider (or the provider of your provider!) is using unsolicited routes that are not reliable/has limited life time. ——————————————————————————————————— Delivering hassle free (and Low Cost!) global SMS termination is not obvious but we are working on it :) Tony Jamous twitter: @nexmo e-mail: tony.jamous [@] nexmo.com