Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]

I take it you've tried (844) 814-4627 ?

I use both Twilio and Plivo, and they're both fine for sms.

(Twilio is running amok because there was a recent court case that providers could be held liable for actions of their clients, so last month you would have received update ToS from several cloud providers in your email.)

If so, does using Twilio's subaccounts feature do anything to prevent your whole account being suspended for the actions of one of your customers?

  As a current Twilio customer, we are notifying you that we are updating our Messaging Policy, available at https://www.twilio.com/legal/messaging-policy. We are sending this message to all customers, regardless of whether action is required to ensure compliance. 
  [...]
  There are a few key sections we’d like to call out:
   Applicability.  We clarified that the Twilio Messaging Policy applies to all organizations using our services, and that Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are responsible for ensuring their users are in compliance.
   Messaging Policy Evasion. We clarified that content or techniques designed to avoid mechanisms that detect policy violations are not permitted.
   Usage Limitations - Content We Do Not Allow. We clarified that you may not send content that is illegal in the jurisdiction where the message recipient lives. For example, in the United States, this includes cannabis and CBD messages.

Phone number on the page and an email address that may work for you. Let me know if that helps.

UPDATE: Your account should be active now.

Twilio is also the only Pay as you Go SaaS vendor that doesn’t have spend limits on accounts and advises customers to implement their own any fraud measures themselves.

While this was going on, we got an email from their sales rep, congratulating us for increasing our spend by more than 8000% and wanted to have a chat. So I guess they do have the systems to monitor unusual patterns, they just turn a blind eye.

You’d never know, someone in Twilio might even be selling customer lists on the black market to the fraudsters so they know who to target.

Lesson learnt, always keep a backup for crucial services and move away from Mailgun

I’ve always been a big advocate for using 3rd party SaaS, but with the level of customer service I’m seeing lately, I’m starting to recommend avoiding it where possible.

Tell FAANG: You blocked me, again

FAANG Support: Important please call back ASAP

Having been a customer since our launch [1], and very early after theirs, it has been really sad and frustrating to see that friendly distrupter energy zap out of the service.

I get why businesses go through that changes like this during growth, but it feels like all the things to let slide, your persona is not one of them!

[1] https://mailosaur.com (somewhat related to the thread we let you test SMS messages)

Two weeks ago, all of the analog lines stopped working, which are local numbers, but our main 800 number forwards to those numbers.

Calling the local provider was futile. The provider’s office was also experiencing the issue and could not receive calls.

Although we do have the 800 number on business cards, we quickly updated our website and Intercom docs to use a recently provisioned 800 number from one of the VOIP providers.

It took 2 days for the other lines to begin working again. This is the first POTS outage we have experienced in several years.

I intend to avoid Twilio in a wide range, don't need that kind of a "business partner" in my life.

- long term we really should move to an industry wide due process system with legislation for compensation and other parameters. once there is some more structure there can also be insurances or similar ways to prevent something like this to ruin a company.

- there maybe is a market for more intermediaries that bundle twilio and messagebird or similar providers and have an official strong communication channel to the providers to resolve issues and provide failover

Tons of platforms seem to operate like this, and this kinda thing happens all the time. HN is turning into a desperate last resort as a PleaForHelp-as-a-Service (hoping that bad PR or a company insider is the trigger).

But by now business decision-makers should really wake up and acknowledge the risk of choosing such platforms. Of course they should demand better service, but this is also something to research upfront ("is there a support desk and at least a phone number.") and then decide if they want to pay the extra money, or go somewhere else that addresses their needs.

Take this a learning experience. Once you get your business back, sit down with your team and come up with a mitigation plan because this may happen again. It's possible you may need to switch to another vendor, even one more expensive or smaller, but one with a dedicated support line and/or an account manager and stronger SLAs. Your business heavily relies on Twilio and you should have someone you can call at Twilio outside of the general support line. Maybe you need to attend their conferences and create a personal relationship with their developers or other employees so in cases like this you can backchannel your issue.

If you're going to outsource critical business infrastructure to third party SAAS vendors, make sure you have a plan for when things go tits up, because things will go tits up. It looks like Twilio screwed up here, but Twilio isn't going to suffer the consequences of this like your business will.

As far as telephony is concerned (things like SMS are a different story), a phone provider cannot legally do this, even if you signed some ToS agreement. According to the FCC, phone providers, including voip providers, have legal requirements around when they are allowed to terminate service: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/when-your-telephone-com...

They’ve turned spamming into a positive ROI business.