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I work in telecom, in a slightly different vein from Twilio's and I deeply empathize with the pain of billing. Even if Twilio's somehow able to ignore the pain

I work in telecom, in a slightly different vein from Twilio's and I deeply empathize with the pain of billing. Even if Twilio's somehow able to ignore the pain of telco engine rating and least-cost-routing, there are still so many places you can make an error and cause something like this. Kudos to Rob and team for owning the issue and I hope the Twilio folks get this sorted out (I'm confident they will). It's worth mentioning that I've never seen another billing issue of this size from Twilio so one in 3-4 years isn't too awful. Compared to AT&T it's probably generous! (Facetious but with a grain of truth). Good luck guys and keep rocking. Here's hoping everything works out.

MichaelGG 13y ago
I'd be really interested to know what ends up being the root cause. I know properly transactional databases ain't so popular in some parts of telecom, but it's pretty simple to insert a record of the charge transactionally. Then the only real failure path is the lack of distributed transactions to the credit card processor, but it's unlikely you're going to run into many repeated commit failures.
- josh2600 13y ago
  Our experience: We run BigCouch for Database and BrainTree for processing. We're using DTH Software for our rating engine at the moment. I don't believe any of these technologies have any failsafes built-in related to credit card processing (or overcharging), and so anyone who uses these systems has to perform their own sanity checks. It's extremely rare for billing to screw up in Telecom, because, essentially, that is the crux of all Telco business. Twilio is probably using a homegrown or Non-telecom billing system, but I don't have any insight into their operations. I would hazard a guess that it's homebrewed though as I can't imagine a processing company introducing an error like this (stranger things have happened). So yeah, I think this will be a one time incident, and frankly, their response was fantastic.

MichaelGG 13y ago

I'd be really interested to know what ends up being the root cause. I know properly transactional databases ain't so popular in some parts of telecom, but it's pretty simple to insert a record of the charge transactionally. Then the only real failure path is the lack of distributed transactions to the credit card processor, but it's unlikely you're going to run into many repeated commit failures.

josh2600 13y ago
Our experience: We run BigCouch for Database and BrainTree for processing. We're using DTH Software for our rating engine at the moment. I don't believe any of these technologies have any failsafes built-in related to credit card processing (or overcharging), and so anyone who uses these systems has to perform their own sanity checks. It's extremely rare for billing to screw up in Telecom, because, essentially, that is the crux of all Telco business. Twilio is probably using a homegrown or Non-telecom billing system, but I don't have any insight into their operations. I would hazard a guess that it's homebrewed though as I can't imagine a processing company introducing an error like this (stranger things have happened). So yeah, I think this will be a one time incident, and frankly, their response was fantastic.