After making this tweet yesterday, Digital Ocean got in touch with me to explain what might have gone wrong. Two members responded: Zach Bouzan-Kaloustian and Tyler Crandall. Both of them sent thoughtful and thorough replies and apologized for the poor experience I'd had up to that point.
When I posted to Twitter yesterday, my goal was to learn what I had done wrong so I could properly teach students how to use Digital Ocean in the future. Turns out there was just a bug in their system related to some code that had just been deployed, and it raised abuse flags for users who signed up during a short window. They've, of course, fixed the bug and are going to make improvements to their support procedures to hopefully avoid situations like mine from yesterday.
Zach's email to me is pasted below, for the curious. But before you get to that, let me very clear: Bugs happen. That includes behavioral bugs, like momentary lapses in support quality. From my first messages on Twitter, I made it clear that Digital Ocean surely had their reasons for locking my account. Having all the information now, it's very easy for me to forgive them for mistakes we could all just as easily have made.
I bolded the above, because a few folks on Twitter who saw my posts said they'd be avoiding Digital Ocean due to how my case was handled. To those folks, I hope you reconsider. My experience from early yesterday almost certainly won't be yours. You will probably have the same stellar experience I had from later yesterday and today.
Here is Zach's email:
Hi Sumeet,
It's Zach, following up from Twitter. I'm going to do my best to reflect on the past few hours and let you know where, and why, we fell short.
To start with, I can not apologize enough for putting you through what I can describe personally as a very poor experience, and certainly not an experience that has been designed this way.
Secondly, I'm sure you're wondering what happened in the first place. To speak candidly, our Trust & Safety team handles and deals with a lot of bad actors. To do that work, we rely on a lot of filters, machine learning from third parties, and even tools from our data and analytics team. To say that we put a lot of energy behind this is an understatement, and as I'm sure as you know from your web development and teaching experiences, it certainly doesn't always go as planned. In this case, the issue was two-fold. Our we put too much faith into these tools and took the human aspect out of this situation and in looking at your account.
I mentioned on Twitter that we really messed this up, and there are a few ways in which we'll work on correcting this. I've just had a post-mortem call with our Manager of Trust & Safety on this subject. This scenario will be brought to the team's attention to perform their own post-mortem on, and we'll develop additional methods to humanize the experience. We'll be reinforcing two key elements of our training in a T&S team offsite in the coming weeks, which will absolutely include reinforcing our policy to assume the best intentions of our customers.
Lastly, I don't expect that this email alone has regained your trust, but I can at least try to make a human gesture. As such, I've added a [redacted] credit to your account which I hope can benefit the Omaha Code School as it offers [lots of] months of hosting for free. You can add students through our recently update Teams program and they can deploy resources on your account: http://do.co/21njIUe
In closing, my sincerest apologies, and iff you have any follow up questions at all please feel free to reply directly to this email or to me directly: [redacted].
Thank you, Zach Bouzan-Kaloustian [redacted]
If that's not the kind of company you want handling your VPS, I don't know what is.
Thanks to Dusty Davidson and Tony Noecker for shooting emails to their friends at Digital Ocean. Not sure if that was the catalyst for my case's speedy resolution or not, but I appreciate the help! <3