7 ms·

Wow, that Oracle Cloud customer support transcript the author found is particularly damning. What a terrible customer experience. I guess this is Oracle-ese for

Wow, that Oracle Cloud customer support transcript the author found is particularly damning. What a terrible customer experience. I guess this is Oracle-ese for "you're not rich enough for us to care." > Customer: Can you help me to see what happen with my Oracle Cloud account please? > Agent: let me check it . one moment > Customer: Sure. It says in the Tenancy details that my user is inactive. Even if I try to upgrade and manage payment it says I don't have access to perform that operation :( > Agent: thank you for waiting. Unfortunately, we are unable to .resolve this issue Sorry, this is all the information we can provide. thank you for contacting us > Customer: Wait, who can help me? Please, provide me at least another way to contact the proper support team. > Agent: we would be the correct department for this issue, but unfortunately we are unable to help further with this issue > Customer: But why? You didn't tell me what was the problem, or what I did wrong... This is very disappointing > Agent: I am afraid I am unable to advise you further. Thank you for contacting us . bye

dessant 4y ago
I wait for the day that this conduct becomes illegal, because it can destroy people's lives. It is actually surprising that consumer protection laws do not yet address the issue of due process.
- mpol 4y ago
  I would assume it is contract based and thus falls already under contract law. You could start a civil case. There is no need to make something illegal that already has ways to get resolved. Part of the problem in the US is that a civil courtcase is a horrible thing. At least in Europe the loser pays the court costs of the winner. That already makes this kind of behaviour less likely. In the US you have to spend lots of money on a court case and they will just drag it out and bleed you dry. The court system is designed to protect the rich minority from the poor majority. Also, do not throw away the baby with the bathwater. A shop owner should have ways to get rid of a bad customer. And yes, even if it is just based on a face that you don't like.
  - dessant 4y ago
    Once a platform is past a certain size, they should no longer be allowed to permanently ban a person without due process. See for example the people whose lives have been affected because they were banned from Facebook for absolutely no reason, and they could no longer access Facebook Marketplace. I think it's very dangerous to create a new type of second-class citizen that can no longer access certain online services, because naive algorithms were allowed to go rampant, without any checks and balances.
    - shagie 4y ago
      Unless there is fraud checks involved, I don't think the person's account is banned. It may be suspended and in which case this can be rectified by adding a payment method and upgrading the account from the free tier to a paid tier. They can still access oracle cloud services... just not for free. As a note, think about the egress charges they were racking up (on a free tier) by doing a mongodump for five hours. The free tier is meant as a teaser for migrating to a paid account - not a perpetual production workload.
      - onli 4y ago
        Not for 5 hours. Five hours ago. Author is talking about a "huge" database, but then mentioned 1GB, which is tiny. In that case there were no significant egress charges.
      - 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
        egress is usually metered.. Oracle could simply put a limit on their free egress. no need to ban
      - LadyCailin 4y ago
        The support case says: > Even if I try to upgrade and manage payment it says I don't have access to perform that operation So no.
        shagie 4y ago
- datavirtue 4y ago
  Sure, it starts with due process for the customer and spreads like a cancer to the employees...no thanks. Democracy will not be tolerated here. --Corp Overlords
- biztos 4y ago
  I discovered recently that my bank (in Germany) can cancel my account without cause. My best guess is they were purging the books of Americans, they refused to tell me the reason, but my takeaway is that if this can happen in the consumer-protection nirvana that is the EU, don’t hold your breath waiting for exploitative practices to be outlawed.
  - mdavis6890 4y ago
    Did they give you your money promptly? How?
    - biztos 4y ago
      Well sort-of. They have to give two months' written notice, and they did, and I was very lucky to catch it in time as I'd been traveling and they had of course not bothered to send me an e-mail nor call any of the three numbers they had for me. So I had about a week's warning and I was able to transfer my money out to other accounts. Had I not done that, they would presumably have held on to it until I'd gone in and personally told them where to send it, which would have locked me out of my money had I been abroad -- it was my primary account, held in good standing for 13 years.
  - fanf2 4y ago
    This is probably to do with the requirements that the IRS imposes on foreign bank accounts belonging to US citizens. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/102915/tax-implications-opening-foreign-bank-account.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10291...
  - SSLy 4y ago
    Well, EU banks hate dealing with USA exporting their laws to their (states') citizens abroad, regarding reporting etc.
    - biztos 4y ago
      Indeed, my other German bank will promptly disown me if I stop living in Germany, but they at least are upfront about it. Leaving aside my annoyance at the first bank's behavior, it was a definite learning moment, in that I had assumed a "normal" bank could not just kick you out because they feel like it. In Germany, indeed they can!
- jsmith45 4y ago
  It is planned to become illegal in the EU soon. The Digital Services Act requires that if on the basis of law/copyright or terms of service violation the service is doing any of the following actions, then there are things it must do: removing or hiding content, stop providing service to a user, suspend/terminate a user's account, or suspend/terminate monitation for a peice of content or user. It must provide a clear explanation of why they are suspending the account, including the precise grounds on which they are relying. If the action is being taken due to feeling some piece of information violates the terms of service, they must identify which term they feel was violated, and an explanation of why they feel the information violates that term. They must clearly indicate if automatic processing was used to come to this decision. For only online service that is not a micro or small enterprise they must: Provide a complaint handling system for appealing these decisions, where the user can explain why they feel the decision is incorrect. The appeals must be handled by qualified staff, not solely based on automated means. The law originally had binding out-of-court arbitration as a mechanism to resolve disputes here (like a company refusing to consider a well founded appeal within the 6 month window), but the latest version has downgraded it to non-binding arbitration ("dispute settlement bodies"). If the consumer wins, the service provider has to cover all costs of the arbitration, but technically they are not bound to do as the arbitrator decided. If the customer loses it must pay its portion, which is free or a nominal charge. Only if a customer file the dispute "manifestly in bad faith", does the customer ever need to cover the service's portion. See Articles 15, 17, 18 of https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2022-0269_EN.html https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2022-0269... for the details as approved by the European Parliament. ---- Bottom line the behavior shown here by oracle would be a massive violation for failing to provide an explanation, and failure to offer the required dispute mechanism.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
Iolaum 4y ago
Could the account be flagged for Anti-Money Launder Investigations or something? In those cases regulations say that if you inform the customer of it you are conducting a tipping offense - which carries criminal penalties. Therefore in those cases representatives will try to say as little as possible.
- tyrfing 4y ago
  Definitely reads as a KYC or fraud flag of some sort. You'll never get any information about those.
- thrtythreeforty 4y ago
  I think a money laundering flag in particular is unlikely; if so, consider how we got here: - Customer is likely not a money launderer, or he wouldn't have posted this transcript as evidence. - How many money launderers buy cloud computing credits with their dirty money? How would there have been money activity at all on the free tier? - Who's doing the flagging? An internal list of people Oracle thinks is shady? That's concerning. Or actual law enforcement? (See points 1 and 2.) Rather I bet it's some internal sweep that Oracle thinks needs similar treatment as money laundering. Whatever process managed to flag these accounts clearly casts way too wide a net.
  - shagie 4y ago
    The transcript section begins: > Even one member has shared it's customer support (which is not available for Always Free users). That isn't his transcript (it is from April 25th). The person is into cryptocurrency and NFTs ( https://batin.sh/blog https://batin.sh/blog )
  - treis 4y ago
    >- How many money launderers buy cloud computing credits with their dirty money? How would there have been money activity at all on the free tier? Lots, I think. Dirty money goes in and clean bitcoin comes out.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
soco 4y ago
Well he had a support discussion. When I got terminated on Tumblr, support never answered on the open case. So there's room for worse.
_huayra_ 4y ago
This is why I'm finally slowly starting to self-host things. It's not really convenient compared to *aaS, as it's a whole lotta new stuff to learn with great consequences for an error (because of the security issues), but I would be absolutely screwed if I needed customer service for any of these "customer is the product" services I use (e.g. everything Google). That alone is worth the hassle.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  I guess we should expect our isp to start banning us without giving reason in the future too.
- striking 4y ago
  I kind of understand not wanting to be at the whims of your service provider, but Oracle is not a particularly amazing example of a typical SaaS provider in any sense of the word. Knowing the first thing about Oracle's history or how it operates should be enough for anyone to choose any other service provider. GCP's support has been fine for me, I've seen folks have acceptable experiences with AWS' support, etc., etc.; I don't really see this as a good reason to go off the grid unless that's something you're already looking to do.
  - _huayra_ 4y ago
    This is actually my approach: move things to "self hosted in the cloud", then move to on-prem (hopefully timed to when I finally get a house after the housing slump gets worse in a year or so fingers crossed). Although the costs aren't monumental, it does add up more than using basic hardware at home (I live in an area with fairly cheap electricity). I also work for one of the major cloud providers, so it kinda pains me to know how fat the margins are and how much I'm getting "ripped off".
    - striking 4y ago
      Yeah, but a lot of that margin is from scale, no? The numbers aren't quite the same when it's just you working on your homelab. Definitely agree with self-hosting when it makes sense, but cost alone might not be a good reason.
LegitShady 4y ago
Dealing with the customer support agents of these companies in cases like this is when the technological dystopia becomes obvious and unavoidable.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
spaetzleesser 4y ago
Kafka would be proud of this dialog.
yellowapple 4y ago
I had a similar experience with Cash App. The app refused to allow me to add funds via any method; it would error out every time. A never-ending parade of "multiple" customer service agents with probably-fake names (Different name every time y'all reply? Yeah, that ain't suspect at all!) decided not that they couldn't identify the issue, but that they could but were "unable" to provide that information to me; apparently I was not allowed to know why they refused to take my money. Long story short, that's why I don't use Cash App and never will.

dessant 4y ago

I wait for the day that this conduct becomes illegal, because it can destroy people's lives. It is actually surprising that consumer protection laws do not yet address the issue of due process.

mpol 4y ago
I would assume it is contract based and thus falls already under contract law. You could start a civil case. There is no need to make something illegal that already has ways to get resolved. Part of the problem in the US is that a civil courtcase is a horrible thing. At least in Europe the loser pays the court costs of the winner. That already makes this kind of behaviour less likely. In the US you have to spend lots of money on a court case and they will just drag it out and bleed you dry. The court system is designed to protect the rich minority from the poor majority. Also, do not throw away the baby with the bathwater. A shop owner should have ways to get rid of a bad customer. And yes, even if it is just based on a face that you don't like.
- dessant 4y ago
  Once a platform is past a certain size, they should no longer be allowed to permanently ban a person without due process. See for example the people whose lives have been affected because they were banned from Facebook for absolutely no reason, and they could no longer access Facebook Marketplace. I think it's very dangerous to create a new type of second-class citizen that can no longer access certain online services, because naive algorithms were allowed to go rampant, without any checks and balances.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Unless there is fraud checks involved, I don't think the person's account is banned. It may be suspended and in which case this can be rectified by adding a payment method and upgrading the account from the free tier to a paid tier. They can still access oracle cloud services... just not for free. As a note, think about the egress charges they were racking up (on a free tier) by doing a mongodump for five hours. The free tier is meant as a teaser for migrating to a paid account - not a perpetual production workload.
    - onli 4y ago
      Not for 5 hours. Five hours ago. Author is talking about a "huge" database, but then mentioned 1GB, which is tiny. In that case there were no significant egress charges.
    - 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
      egress is usually metered.. Oracle could simply put a limit on their free egress. no need to ban
    - LadyCailin 4y ago
      The support case says: > Even if I try to upgrade and manage payment it says I don't have access to perform that operation So no.
      - shagie 4y ago
datavirtue 4y ago
Sure, it starts with due process for the customer and spreads like a cancer to the employees...no thanks. Democracy will not be tolerated here. --Corp Overlords
biztos 4y ago
I discovered recently that my bank (in Germany) can cancel my account without cause. My best guess is they were purging the books of Americans, they refused to tell me the reason, but my takeaway is that if this can happen in the consumer-protection nirvana that is the EU, don’t hold your breath waiting for exploitative practices to be outlawed.
- mdavis6890 4y ago
  Did they give you your money promptly? How?
  - biztos 4y ago
    Well sort-of. They have to give two months' written notice, and they did, and I was very lucky to catch it in time as I'd been traveling and they had of course not bothered to send me an e-mail nor call any of the three numbers they had for me. So I had about a week's warning and I was able to transfer my money out to other accounts. Had I not done that, they would presumably have held on to it until I'd gone in and personally told them where to send it, which would have locked me out of my money had I been abroad -- it was my primary account, held in good standing for 13 years.
- fanf2 4y ago
  This is probably to do with the requirements that the IRS imposes on foreign bank accounts belonging to US citizens. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/102915/tax-implications-opening-foreign-bank-account.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10291...
- SSLy 4y ago
  Well, EU banks hate dealing with USA exporting their laws to their (states') citizens abroad, regarding reporting etc.
  - biztos 4y ago
    Indeed, my other German bank will promptly disown me if I stop living in Germany, but they at least are upfront about it. Leaving aside my annoyance at the first bank's behavior, it was a definite learning moment, in that I had assumed a "normal" bank could not just kick you out because they feel like it. In Germany, indeed they can!
jsmith45 4y ago
It is planned to become illegal in the EU soon. The Digital Services Act requires that if on the basis of law/copyright or terms of service violation the service is doing any of the following actions, then there are things it must do: removing or hiding content, stop providing service to a user, suspend/terminate a user's account, or suspend/terminate monitation for a peice of content or user. It must provide a clear explanation of why they are suspending the account, including the precise grounds on which they are relying. If the action is being taken due to feeling some piece of information violates the terms of service, they must identify which term they feel was violated, and an explanation of why they feel the information violates that term. They must clearly indicate if automatic processing was used to come to this decision. For only online service that is not a micro or small enterprise they must: Provide a complaint handling system for appealing these decisions, where the user can explain why they feel the decision is incorrect. The appeals must be handled by qualified staff, not solely based on automated means. The law originally had binding out-of-court arbitration as a mechanism to resolve disputes here (like a company refusing to consider a well founded appeal within the 6 month window), but the latest version has downgraded it to non-binding arbitration ("dispute settlement bodies"). If the consumer wins, the service provider has to cover all costs of the arbitration, but technically they are not bound to do as the arbitrator decided. If the customer loses it must pay its portion, which is free or a nominal charge. Only if a customer file the dispute "manifestly in bad faith", does the customer ever need to cover the service's portion. See Articles 15, 17, 18 of https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2022-0269_EN.html https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2022-0269... for the details as approved by the European Parliament. ---- Bottom line the behavior shown here by oracle would be a massive violation for failing to provide an explanation, and failure to offer the required dispute mechanism.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

Iolaum 4y ago

Could the account be flagged for Anti-Money Launder Investigations or something? In those cases regulations say that if you inform the customer of it you are conducting a tipping offense - which carries criminal penalties. Therefore in those cases representatives will try to say as little as possible.

tyrfing 4y ago
Definitely reads as a KYC or fraud flag of some sort. You'll never get any information about those.
thrtythreeforty 4y ago
I think a money laundering flag in particular is unlikely; if so, consider how we got here: - Customer is likely not a money launderer, or he wouldn't have posted this transcript as evidence. - How many money launderers buy cloud computing credits with their dirty money? How would there have been money activity at all on the free tier? - Who's doing the flagging? An internal list of people Oracle thinks is shady? That's concerning. Or actual law enforcement? (See points 1 and 2.) Rather I bet it's some internal sweep that Oracle thinks needs similar treatment as money laundering. Whatever process managed to flag these accounts clearly casts way too wide a net.
- shagie 4y ago
  The transcript section begins: > Even one member has shared it's customer support (which is not available for Always Free users). That isn't his transcript (it is from April 25th). The person is into cryptocurrency and NFTs ( https://batin.sh/blog https://batin.sh/blog )
- treis 4y ago
  >- How many money launderers buy cloud computing credits with their dirty money? How would there have been money activity at all on the free tier? Lots, I think. Dirty money goes in and clean bitcoin comes out.
- charcircuit 4y ago

soco 4y ago

Well he had a support discussion. When I got terminated on Tumblr, support never answered on the open case. So there's room for worse.

_huayra_ 4y ago

This is why I'm finally slowly starting to self-host things. It's not really convenient compared to *aaS, as it's a whole lotta new stuff to learn with great consequences for an error (because of the security issues), but I would be absolutely screwed if I needed customer service for any of these "customer is the product" services I use (e.g. everything Google). That alone is worth the hassle.

prmoustache 4y ago
I guess we should expect our isp to start banning us without giving reason in the future too.
striking 4y ago
I kind of understand not wanting to be at the whims of your service provider, but Oracle is not a particularly amazing example of a typical SaaS provider in any sense of the word. Knowing the first thing about Oracle's history or how it operates should be enough for anyone to choose any other service provider. GCP's support has been fine for me, I've seen folks have acceptable experiences with AWS' support, etc., etc.; I don't really see this as a good reason to go off the grid unless that's something you're already looking to do.
- _huayra_ 4y ago
  This is actually my approach: move things to "self hosted in the cloud", then move to on-prem (hopefully timed to when I finally get a house after the housing slump gets worse in a year or so fingers crossed). Although the costs aren't monumental, it does add up more than using basic hardware at home (I live in an area with fairly cheap electricity). I also work for one of the major cloud providers, so it kinda pains me to know how fat the margins are and how much I'm getting "ripped off".
  - striking 4y ago
    Yeah, but a lot of that margin is from scale, no? The numbers aren't quite the same when it's just you working on your homelab. Definitely agree with self-hosting when it makes sense, but cost alone might not be a good reason.

LegitShady 4y ago

Dealing with the customer support agents of these companies in cases like this is when the technological dystopia becomes obvious and unavoidable.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

spaetzleesser 4y ago

Kafka would be proud of this dialog.

yellowapple 4y ago

I had a similar experience with Cash App. The app refused to allow me to add funds via any method; it would error out every time. A never-ending parade of "multiple" customer service agents with probably-fake names (Different name every time y'all reply? Yeah, that ain't suspect at all!) decided not that they couldn't identify the issue, but that they could but were "unable" to provide that information to me; apparently I was not allowed to know why they refused to take my money. Long story short, that's why I don't use Cash App and never will.