7 ms·

Oracle Cloud deleting active user accounts without possibility for data recovery

240 points by jeroenhd 2y ago

kwanbix 2y 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.
- dijit 2y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33199750 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075210 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883
  - StressedDev 2y 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.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - dijit 2y ago
      There are so many cases where Oracle have acted in bad faith that I don’t think defending them is the right move. “Don’t anthropomorphise the lawnmower”. Let us not forget that they bankrupted the second largest city in the UK, it’s hardly an isolated incident. They are exactly as evil as people say, I know its hard to reason, there’s always shades of grey after all, but I know of know of no other consistently one-dimensional company.
      - jaggederest 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
    - cyberax 2y ago
      > However, not everyone has a bad experience with them Examples? I know several large companies that spent tens of millions to get _away_ from Oracle.
    - Retric 2y ago
      > not everyone has a bad experience with them You don’t stay in business for long while burning every single bridge. The standards for acceptable behavior from a supplier / business partner are a little higher than just doesn’t fuck over every single contract.
      - belter 2y ago
        Broadcom enters the room....
        numbsafari 2y ago
        Oracle is holding the door from the inside, smiling widely.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
  Seriously, it's the most abusive company on earth.
- joshuaissac 2y 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 2y ago
    You definitely don't want to be on Oracle cloud then. Stay far away from Stargate.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y 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 2y 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_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
- ndsipa_pomu 2y 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 2y 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.
  - dijit 2y 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.
- StressedDev 2y 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 2y 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.
    - StressedDev 2y ago
      OK, what products have gotten worse under Oracle? How do they compare to their competitors? Why don't people leave Oracle if it is so bad? Remember, people can and do move platforms all of the time. A good example is how the cloud took off despite the huge amount of work it takes to move things to the cloud. My main point is saying one of the largest software companies in the world is "bad" or "makes things worse" says nothing. You need to give specific examples. Also, it's hard to believe that Oracle never gets anything right. Really? Everyone of their thousands of employees does bad work? All of their products are "bad" and have no good points? That does not pass the laugh test.
      - cyberax 2y ago
        > OK, what products have gotten worse under Oracle? Java.
        mardifoufs 2y ago
        In what way? I'm actually curious.
      - protimewaster 2y ago
        I think most people feel like the Sun Microsystems products all got worse after the Oracle purchase. E.g., Solaris, Java. It's prolly gonna be hard to find any specific metrics to show that, though. But I remember everyone thinking that all of the Sun offerings had gotten worse after the acquisition. And OpenSolaris got axed altogether, of course. And Java had a series of security embarrassments.
- bastardoperator 2y ago
  I find it interesting that Tiktok went with Oracle given their history with the CIA.
  - 7thpower 2y 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 2y ago
    There was political pressure. Still there.
- jeroenhd 2y 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.
  - 7thpower 2y 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 2y ago
    I've been trying to sign up to them for over a year, and it keeps failing. Support tickets remain unanswered.
    - jeroenhd 2y ago
      They don't do support for free tiers, and their free tier is often overbooked, so from what I can tell they just silently drop people? Seems like terrible business to me, but so does most of what Oracle does.
  - crayonista 2y 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.
    - pvo50555 2y ago
      When did you manage to get that? I tried signing up for the ARM server several times but it always says it's unavailable at the moment in my region (East - Toronto) and I should try a different region... however you can't switch regions after you set up your account. I talked to their support and they said it's unavailable for the foreseeable future... choose a different configuration. Are people still able to provision those instances in other regions? If so, which one(s)? I'm just using the legacy free one for now, the 2GHz AMD with 0.5GB RAM.
- marcosdumay 2y 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.
- belter 2y ago
  This as been posted here in at least 60 occasions...But clearly not enough times..: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1982 https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1982
- diyseguy 2y ago
  Why do people want to pay for Oracle when PostgreSQL and MySQL are free and work well?
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  Mistake +mystery = mistery
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    And it’s only one “t” away from “misery” ;-)
- Artoooooor 2y ago
  If you have big system using specifics of their databases, switching can be expensive. Maybe good in long term, but risky.
- fluidcruft 2y ago
  Are there even any other options if you're running EPIC?
- hulitu 2y 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_iain 2y 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.
- RobGR 2y 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_iain 2y 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.
    - ErikUden 2y ago
      Here's the interesting part: I have two Oracle Cloud accounts (one under a different name, basically made by a different person and I just manage it). That other account runs a Fediverse instance, basically a social network where images and posts are “federated”, which could practically mean ANY content, including the illegal kind. If that account was nuked for disobeying the terms of service, I would've somehow understood the reason. Most likely because some CSAM was uploaded which was federated to my / Oracle's servers. However, that server and account wasn't deleted. Only my account, which simply had a Nextcloud instance on it, was deleted in this strange way. Now, technically you could also host horrible stuff on Nextcloud, however I am VERY certain this isn't the case. Additionally, I think they'd need to tell me if that was the reason? Everything about this is so strange.
- crote 2y ago
  What are you going to do, sue Oracle?
RobGR 2y ago
Ever since seeing this talk https://archive.org/details/youtube-eXe-rvXVL-g 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 2y ago
Perhaps related to this? https://www.reddit.com/r/oracle/comments/1hsjxz9/oci_what_action_to_take_on_email_about_oracle/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oracle/comments/1hsjxz9/oci_what_ac...
- ErikUden 2y 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 2y ago
OP is suggesting it is in retaliation for a criticizing viral post... https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930176963645558 https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930176963645558
- epakai 2y ago
  He also points out his own accusation is baseless: https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930295586771514 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 https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930279621469673 Anyway, since Oracle won't say, it seems fine to take adverse inference.
  - ErikUden 2y 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 2y 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.
mgdev 2y 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.
- ErikUden 2y ago
  Jesus...
- Marsymars 2y 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.
- mgdev 2y ago
  Update: they contested my chargeback. Going through round 2!
JaggerFoo 2y ago
This happened to me when Oracle first started in the cloud business. I actively avoid doing business with their cloud services.
- ErikUden 2y ago
  I think I learned the lesson the hard way.
bluesounddirect 2y ago
hey how else are they going to make space for project stargate! your data has been deported.
Hizonner 2y ago
Run. Important. Things. On. Premises. Idiots.
- marcinzm 2y 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.
- esskay 2y 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.
Cieric 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
  - Cieric 2y 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.
nubinetwork 2y 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 2y ago
  By not canceling payments he is making his case ready to go to court.
  - ErikUden 2y 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.
    - ErikUden 2y ago
      I could of course call my bank and tell them to cancel it etc. etc. At this point I'm just... let it happen. Something may come out of it, maybe nothing.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - thrtythreeforty 2y ago
      Lawyers are about the only thing Oracle really, truly understands. You'll finally be speaking their language. I'd have said money is the other thing, but apparently your money smells bad.
esskay 2y 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_w 2y 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.
- ErikUden 2y 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_w 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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,
- jeroenhd 2y 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!
codr7 2y 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.
- ErikUden 2y ago
  I whole heartedly support this movement
foxfired 2y 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
- ErikUden 2y 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.
- jeroenhd 2y 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 2y 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...
skissane 2y 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 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 2y ago
  That was Google, not Oracle.
  - skissane 2y ago
    Yes, you are right. The fact that Thomas Kurian was involved mangled my memory because he used to be at Oracle.
ErikUden 2y ago
Thank you for posting this here. I am glad many people are sharing their story in the comments.
bityard 2y 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 2y ago
That’s how they roll yes. Good free tier but don’t trust it with anything that matters
fargle 2y 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

240 points by jeroenhd 2y 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.

dijit 2y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33199750 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075210 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883
- StressedDev 2y 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.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - dijit 2y ago
    There are so many cases where Oracle have acted in bad faith that I don’t think defending them is the right move. “Don’t anthropomorphise the lawnmower”. Let us not forget that they bankrupted the second largest city in the UK, it’s hardly an isolated incident. They are exactly as evil as people say, I know its hard to reason, there’s always shades of grey after all, but I know of know of no other consistently one-dimensional company.
    - jaggederest 2y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > However, not everyone has a bad experience with them Examples? I know several large companies that spent tens of millions to get _away_ from Oracle.
  - Retric 2y ago
    > not everyone has a bad experience with them You don’t stay in business for long while burning every single bridge. The standards for acceptable behavior from a supplier / business partner are a little higher than just doesn’t fuck over every single contract.
    - belter 2y ago
      Broadcom enters the room....
      - numbsafari 2y ago
        Oracle is holding the door from the inside, smiling widely.
dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
Seriously, it's the most abusive company on earth.
joshuaissac 2y 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 2y ago
  You definitely don't want to be on Oracle cloud then. Stay far away from Stargate.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y 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 2y 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_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
ndsipa_pomu 2y 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 2y 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.
- dijit 2y 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.
StressedDev 2y 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 2y 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.
  - StressedDev 2y ago
    OK, what products have gotten worse under Oracle? How do they compare to their competitors? Why don't people leave Oracle if it is so bad? Remember, people can and do move platforms all of the time. A good example is how the cloud took off despite the huge amount of work it takes to move things to the cloud. My main point is saying one of the largest software companies in the world is "bad" or "makes things worse" says nothing. You need to give specific examples. Also, it's hard to believe that Oracle never gets anything right. Really? Everyone of their thousands of employees does bad work? All of their products are "bad" and have no good points? That does not pass the laugh test.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      > OK, what products have gotten worse under Oracle? Java.
      - mardifoufs 2y ago
        In what way? I'm actually curious.
    - protimewaster 2y ago
      I think most people feel like the Sun Microsystems products all got worse after the Oracle purchase. E.g., Solaris, Java. It's prolly gonna be hard to find any specific metrics to show that, though. But I remember everyone thinking that all of the Sun offerings had gotten worse after the acquisition. And OpenSolaris got axed altogether, of course. And Java had a series of security embarrassments.
bastardoperator 2y ago
I find it interesting that Tiktok went with Oracle given their history with the CIA.
- 7thpower 2y 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 2y ago
  There was political pressure. Still there.
jeroenhd 2y 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.
- 7thpower 2y 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 2y ago
  I've been trying to sign up to them for over a year, and it keeps failing. Support tickets remain unanswered.
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    They don't do support for free tiers, and their free tier is often overbooked, so from what I can tell they just silently drop people? Seems like terrible business to me, but so does most of what Oracle does.
- crayonista 2y 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.
  - pvo50555 2y ago
    When did you manage to get that? I tried signing up for the ARM server several times but it always says it's unavailable at the moment in my region (East - Toronto) and I should try a different region... however you can't switch regions after you set up your account. I talked to their support and they said it's unavailable for the foreseeable future... choose a different configuration. Are people still able to provision those instances in other regions? If so, which one(s)? I'm just using the legacy free one for now, the 2GHz AMD with 0.5GB RAM.
marcosdumay 2y 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.
belter 2y ago
This as been posted here in at least 60 occasions...But clearly not enough times..: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1982 https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1982
diyseguy 2y ago
Why do people want to pay for Oracle when PostgreSQL and MySQL are free and work well?
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Mistake +mystery = mistery
- rdtsc 2y ago
  And it’s only one “t” away from “misery” ;-)
Artoooooor 2y ago
If you have big system using specifics of their databases, switching can be expensive. Maybe good in long term, but risky.
fluidcruft 2y ago
Are there even any other options if you're running EPIC?
hulitu 2y 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_iain 2y 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.

RobGR 2y 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_iain 2y 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.
  - ErikUden 2y ago
    Here's the interesting part: I have two Oracle Cloud accounts (one under a different name, basically made by a different person and I just manage it). That other account runs a Fediverse instance, basically a social network where images and posts are “federated”, which could practically mean ANY content, including the illegal kind. If that account was nuked for disobeying the terms of service, I would've somehow understood the reason. Most likely because some CSAM was uploaded which was federated to my / Oracle's servers. However, that server and account wasn't deleted. Only my account, which simply had a Nextcloud instance on it, was deleted in this strange way. Now, technically you could also host horrible stuff on Nextcloud, however I am VERY certain this isn't the case. Additionally, I think they'd need to tell me if that was the reason? Everything about this is so strange.
crote 2y ago
What are you going to do, sue Oracle?

RobGR 2y ago

Ever since seeing this talk https://archive.org/details/youtube-eXe-rvXVL-g 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 2y ago

Perhaps related to this? https://www.reddit.com/r/oracle/comments/1hsjxz9/oci_what_action_to_take_on_email_about_oracle/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oracle/comments/1hsjxz9/oci_what_ac...

ErikUden 2y 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 2y ago

OP is suggesting it is in retaliation for a criticizing viral post... https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930176963645558 https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930176963645558

epakai 2y ago
He also points out his own accusation is baseless: https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930295586771514 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 https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930279621469673 Anyway, since Oracle won't say, it seems fine to take adverse inference.
- ErikUden 2y 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 2y 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.

mgdev 2y 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.

ErikUden 2y ago
Jesus...
Marsymars 2y 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.
mgdev 2y ago
Update: they contested my chargeback. Going through round 2!

JaggerFoo 2y ago

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

ErikUden 2y ago
I think I learned the lesson the hard way.

bluesounddirect 2y ago

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

Hizonner 2y ago

Run. Important. Things. On. Premises. Idiots.

marcinzm 2y 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.
esskay 2y 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.

Cieric 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
- Cieric 2y 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.

nubinetwork 2y 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 2y ago
By not canceling payments he is making his case ready to go to court.
- ErikUden 2y 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.
  - ErikUden 2y ago
    I could of course call my bank and tell them to cancel it etc. etc. At this point I'm just... let it happen. Something may come out of it, maybe nothing.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - thrtythreeforty 2y ago
    Lawyers are about the only thing Oracle really, truly understands. You'll finally be speaking their language. I'd have said money is the other thing, but apparently your money smells bad.

esskay 2y 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_w 2y 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.

ErikUden 2y 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_w 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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,

jeroenhd 2y 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!

codr7 2y 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.

ErikUden 2y ago
I whole heartedly support this movement

foxfired 2y 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

ErikUden 2y 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.
jeroenhd 2y 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 2y 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...

skissane 2y 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 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 2y ago
That was Google, not Oracle.
- skissane 2y ago
  Yes, you are right. The fact that Thomas Kurian was involved mangled my memory because he used to be at Oracle.

ErikUden 2y ago

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

bityard 2y 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 2y ago

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

fargle 2y 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