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Why don't they refund every paid customer who was impacted? Why do they rely on the customer to self report the issue for a refund? For example GCS had 96% pac
by exwiki 7y ago
Why don't they refund every paid customer who was impacted? Why do they rely on the customer to self report the issue for a refund?
For example GCS had 96% packet loss in us-west. So doesn't it make sense to refund every customer who had any API call to a GCS bucket on us-west during the outage?
- mehrdadn 7y agoProbably because it seems to be in the SLA that the customer must notify Google? https://cloud.google.com/storage/sla https://cloud.google.com/storage/sla > "[Customer Must Request Financial Credit] In order to receive any of the Financial Credits described above, Customer must notify Google technical support within thirty days from the time Customer becomes eligible to receive a Financial Credit. Failure to comply with this requirement will forfeit Customer’s right to receive a Financial Credit."
- lucb1e 7y agoSo the answer to why it is this way, is because they wrote it down this way..? I think the real question was why this decision was made, not whether they announced this.
- sbr464 7y agoI agree, but it’s pretty standard SLA verbiage (from the telco/bandwith provider days) to require the customer to request/register the SLA violation to benefit.
- vageli 7y ago> I agree, but it’s pretty standard SLA verbiage (from the telco/bandwith provider days) to require the customer to request/register the SLA violation to benefit. FiOS has proactively given me per-day refunds of service without notification on my part. Weird to me that Verizon acts better than Google in this case.
- sbr464 7y agoInteresting, which kind of fios account? (residential/SMB/data center interconnect) That’s ideally how it should be!
- vageli 7y agoResidential.
- macintux 7y agoIt’s easier to determine “this line was down thus everyone along the line was also down” than what Google is facing.
- vageli 7y agoGoogle knows the affected regions and probably has very fine grained data around this. I mean, they can even tell you metrics about your instances, they don't have monitoring on their own infrastructure to determine impact radius?
- macintux 7y agoIt’s a vastly complex problem. What servers were impacted? For what percentage of the overall outage was each server impacted? During that time, was the server offline or simply slower than usual? And the part that even Google can’t know, even if they somehow can assemble all of the above: did it matter? Not all servers are created equal. Small wonder they’re letting customers drive their own reimbursement process.
- partiallypro 7y agoMicrosoft refunded after their latest outage in South Central. Google might announce a refund later, though I did read on here that some of their outage was not covered by their SLA.
- msbarnett 7y agoThey write the need for the customer to request it into the SLA, probably on the theory that a lot of customers won’t, which saves them money.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zizee 7y agoCynical view: By making people jump through hoops to make the request, a lot of people will not bother. Assuming they only refund the service costs for the hours of outage, only the largest of customers will be owed a refund that is greater than the cost of an employee chasing compiling the information requested. For sake of argument, if you have a monthly bill of 10k (a reasonably sized operation), a 1 day outage will result in a refund of around $300, not a lot of money. The real loss for a business this ^ size is lost business from a day long outage. Getting a refund to cover the hosting costs is peanuts.
- idunno246 7y agofor your example, one day would be about 3% of downtime. My understanding of their sla, for the services ive checked with an sla, a 3% downtime is a 25% credit for the month's total, or $2500, assuming its all sla spend. In this outage's case you might be able to argue for a 10% credit on affected services for the month, figuring 3.5 hours down is 99.6% uptime. but i still agree, it cost us way more in developer time and anxiety than our infra costs, and could have been even worse revenue impacting if we had gcp in that flow
- zizee 7y agoGood point, I stand corrected/educated. From GCP's top level SLA: https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla 99.00% - < 99.99% - 10% off your monthly spend 95.00% - < 99.00% - 25% off your monthly spend < 95.00% - 50% off your monthly spend
- ohashi 7y ago<95%... that's catastrophically bad.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> For sake of argument, if you have a monthly bill of 10k (a reasonably sized operation), a 1 day outage will result in a refund of around $300, not a lot of money. Probably literally not worth your engineer's time to fill in the form for the refund.
- gerdesj 7y agoYou get what you pay for.
- jasonjei 7y agoMy question is if you had to pay for Google AdWords and your site was inaccessible due to GCloud outage, do you have recourse on SLA for paid clicks? Or is that money paid to Google AdWords lost?
- stanley 7y agoIn the same boat. The icing on the cake was they disapproved one of the ads due to the destination URL not loading.. which was in itself surprising, because everything outside of the affected region was running fine.
- grafporno 7y agoFucking money.
- ernsheong 7y agoCustomer having to request for refund has been documented in their SLA, e.g. https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla Having said that, if Google wants to delight customers, they should give a free tier bonus to all customers for a certain period, but such a thing cannot be fair to everyone.
- rhizome 7y ago>Having said that, if Google wants to delight customers It'd never happen, "delight" is an Apple principle.
- oceliker 7y agoNot directly GCS-related, but there was a big Youtube TV outage during the World Cup of last year (I think it was during semi-finals?). Google did apologize, but they only offered a free week of Youtube TV, which they implemented by charging me a week later than usual. I didn't feel compensated at all (it was a pretty important game that I missed!)
- illumin8 7y agoWow, what a dick move...
- chipperyman573 7y agoWhat would you prefer they did instead?
- oceliker 7y agoHonestly, just the apology would be better. I felt I was being tricked. I end up paying each month anyway; it changed nothing for me.
- all_blue_chucks 7y agoWhy do retailers use mail-in rebates instead of just lowering the price?
- baddox 7y agoIt’s probably more than just “some buyers will forget or not bother to redeem the rebate.” There are other reasons, like price discrimination.
- pishpash 7y agoThat's for price discrimination. This is more like the usual case of don't pay if you don't have to, though in Google's case it could well be that they don't care.
- parliament32 7y agoSame reason mail-in rebates used to be a huge thing on physical products. They're well aware that ~50% won't bother, so that $10 discount per unit effectively becomes a $5 discount.