Lost all my sites overnight: Vercel terminated my account without notice
This week, my Vercel account was suddenly disabled and all of my deployments and data were deleted.
I received no warning, no suspension notice, and no post-action explanation. When I emailed their support to ask what happened, they refused to give a reason and simply said they wouldn’t restore the account or data.
I’ve been a Vercel user for over two years and never had any issue until now. It’s honestly shocking to lose everything overnight without a single email or warning.
I’m now migrating all my projects to Cloudflare, but the experience has been incredibly frustrating. I just want to understand why this happened — and whether anyone else has faced a similar sudden ban.
Has anyone here managed to get a clear answer from Vercel in a situation like this?
11 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 32.0 ms ] threadEdit: Strange I would get so many downvotes for this. Care to explain? I think the effective Next.js lock-in is well documented. Yeah you can technically run it on arbitrary platforms with substantial work and continued maintenance, but you're working against the tide.
The terminally online developer cares very much about signaling his love of artisanal webshit. He makes his chosen flavor of the month JavaScript framework, and by extension, the "platform" used to host it, part of his identity. Maybe his favorite mustachioed "influencer" shills it on YouTube with a coupon code for 50% off your first month, or maybe an idol with 700k Twitter followers says it's the framework (and not his fanboys) that makes him $200k monthly passive income from side projects. Branded laptop stickers are a guarantee, maybe even a hoodie. So when he encounters a rational, level-headed observation like yours, he takes it as a jab at his beloved Vercel Inc., benevolent maintainer of Next.js valued at $3.25bn with the best customer support in the industry, and hits "downvote". His job is done.
Maybe Vercel lost the data.
Maybe Vercel saw a regulatory issue.
My advice is to keep building on a different platform.
Good luck.
More and more companies have zero meaningful support when things go sideways
I'm guessing one or more of your sites allowed user-uploads in some fashion or another and someone put a file that is hash-flagged in a serious manner
I don’t mean, which do you agree or consider just cause for leading to it. But as the operator of them, you are best positioned to estimate which one(s) a risk-avoidant corporation would be most likely reacting to, and knowing more about your actual circumstances would be valuable anecdata for others trying to help (as well as those reconsidering Vercel!).
I don't know anything about your sites or your activities, but based on the behavior described, something like this has probably happened to you.
1. After 10 days of communication with Vercel, the platform has unblocked my account and websites, and provided the specific explanation I expected.
2. One of my websites remains blocked because a page on it has a DMCA issue, while the other websites have been unblocked.
3. Over these 10 days, I have migrated some of my websites to Cloudflare, which was not an easy process. Technically, it involved migrating from Next.js to Open Next.js, requiring modifications and testing of a significant amount of code.
4. If anyone is interested, I can share my experience with the technical migration as well as the communication process with Vercel.
5. I would like to express my gratitude for everyone's suggestions at all times.