by bombcar 9 hours ago
These global cloud outages aren’t the real issue; they affect everyone and get fixed.
What is killer is when there is a KNOWN issue that affects YOU but basically only you so why bother fixing it!
I mean, I still prefer to have the ability to fix it myself, because I know I can probably do it in 1h max. I know this doesn't apply to most people, especially those outside of HN though.
Even if resolution times are equal, there is some comfort in being able to see the problem and make progress on it to feel like you're actively doing something. I work in a large enterprise and we have a team dedicated to managing critical incidents and getting everyone together for a resolution. When a 3rd party vendor is the reason for the outage, those calls are really awkward. It's a bunch of people sitting around pressing F5, all frantically trying to make it look like they are actively helping, when no one is actually doing anything, because they can't.
I equate it to driving. I'd rather be moving at a normal speed on side streets than sitting in traffic on the expressway, even if the expressway is technically faster.
Today a client is having some issue with Zoom because of some artificial rate limits they impose. Their support is not responding, the account can't be used, courses can not be held and there's not much we can do.
We already started looking into moving away from Zoom, I suggested self-hosting http://jitsi.org Based on their docs, self-hosting is well supported, and probably a $50-$100 server is more than enough, so a lot cheaper than Zoom.
Artifical limits because they are on the free plan?
Artifical limits, because they have 40 paid licenses that they can not use, because of a non-disclosed assignment limit that is NOT mentioned in the pricing page nor in the ToS.
A lot of people are angry about this, and I think it's borderline illegal: https://devforum.zoom.us/t/you-have-exceeded-the-limit-of-li...
You pay for something, and you can't use it.
This is why we never changed the licenses, we just made long-running identical ID meetings that everyone can join.
But we’re moving away as it’s only going to get worse.
That's a cool work-around.
What I don't like, is that whenever you contact Zoom, their representatives are taught to say one thing: buy more licenses.
Not only that, but their API/pricing is specifically designed to cover edge-cases that will force you to buy a license.
For example, they don't expose an API to assign a co-host. You can do that via the UI, manually, but not via the API.
Can you share which solution are you moving to?
If a company doesn't respond to this it tells you they likely only respond to lawsuits. As a paying customer whose business operations are impacted, you should have standing to sue. Your company could potentially extract from Zoom the entirety of the money that their dumb decision made your company lose. Consult a lawyer for actual advice and next steps.
Of course, it's also possible you signed a contract that basically says "we can just decide not to work and you can't do anything about it" in which case, sucks, and fire whoever negotiates your B2B contracts. But also, those clauses can be void if the violation is serious enough.
Probably not worth the effort, for a couple days of downtime, we'll just move somewhere else.
But I agree, I recognize the silence in that forum thread that was locked without a resolution: some boss said "let they complain or pay, we don't care about them otherwise".
It's interesting to see Comcast is using that. I would have expected them to go with the mainstream vendors.
Are you always available to react within 1h?