Developer Abdelkader Boudih, aka Seuros, says he’s been an Amazon Web Services (AWS) subscriber for years. The cloud service was an integral part of his work — and now everything is destroyed.
In his blog Boudih describes in detail his “complete digital destruction” by AWS administrators day by day and warns against trusting cloud services. According to him, a lot of important data was lost, including a complete programming textbook, electronics tutorials, and years of unpublished code.
“AWS wasn’t just my backup — it was my clean open source development room,” the victim writes.
On Thursday, July 10, Boudih received a verification request with a 5-day deadline to respond (the countdown included the weekend). Then began a typical story of struggle with tech support: delays, escalations, requests for ID verification, template answers that did not match the request and the facts, etc. On July 23, the engineer was stunned when he received a notification that his account had been terminated.
Over the next few days of dialogs and boilerplate AWS responses, Boudih began to worry about the safety of his data. Indeed, it appeared to have been deleted while his read-only access requests were ignored. «Since the account verification was not completed by this date, the account resources have been terminated»,” wrote AWS representative or bot, who immediately asked us to rate the support on a scale of five stars.
The programmer emphasizes that this “20-day support nightmare” is not in line with AWS’s public policy, which provides for freezing closed accounts for 90 days, during which they can supposedly be reopened, and data should be stored all the time. However, the procedure for closing due to a failed verification does not provide access.
The victim claims that he later received a tip from an insider: all his data was erased due to a simple syntax error during the audit of the client’s account. All further correspondence from technical support regarding the account audit was just a smokescreen.
How writes Tom’s Hardware, a theory arose in the community while discussing the situation: that the difference in syntax between Ruby and Java scripts led to the fact that when an AWS administrator checked inactive accounts, he accidentally delete active records instead of performing a test run to verify the results. As Budich says, the «parametric parsing of Java in 1995 turned the simulation into a» disappearance event.
Boudih believes that he was not the only person affected by this at AWS MENA (Middle East and North Africa). He says AWS can’t just brush this customer off with non-response scenarios. The programmer decided to create a «free tool to help people cancel AWS». It will also help AWS subscribers switch to Oracle, Azure, and Google Cloud services.
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