Getting weird results from GCP europe-west1

Can 100% agree with @Julienfastre, we’ve checked every possible email on our side and there is absolutely no mention of the closure.

Influx Cloud, as a data-storage service and data-management service, needs to do a lot more than “understand” and be “ever so sorry”, you need to communicate clearly with customers, and actually store and manage the data responsibly and reliably.

Looking forward to your resolving of this issue.

3 Likes

I agree with @Julienfastre.

My situation is nearly the same:
1. There wasn’t any notice in the UI. I really doubt that all people in this threa have missed notification in the ui if it has been shown.
2. We also wasn’t aware of “status.influxdata.com” until this issue appeared. Even through, are we supposed to subsribe and receive emails about all regions where InfluxDB operates? In this case it’s really easy to miss your region updates in all of the flood.
3. No email has been received. I’ve personnally checked multiple mailboxes, spam folder: anywhere it may have been. Only newspapers and community updates, where was nothing about closure.

1 Like

Yep, I just found out we’ve lost 10GB of customer data because we didn’t think to regularly check the UI nor status page for information.

Emails definitely not received, but I have received their latest invoice just a couple of days ago, along with plenty of marketing emails. Funny that.

1 Like

Hi all, completely understand the upset. I have collated the feedback on all fronts for the team to review when they wake up later today. I will keep you informed here if there is any further news.

1 Like

We have a similar experience; no notable communication via the UI, which we use almost daily, and no emails to emails connected to the organisation. How will influx solve this and migrate data? Data loss is not an acceptable option.

2 Likes

I have not directly been affected by this debacle, but I would like to add the
observation that I have never previously come across a professional hosting
provider who announces the closure of some service and then simultaneously
blocks access to the data (or even more extreme, turns off the servers holding
it), thereby preventing people from retreiving their historical data for some
reasonable period of time after the service itself is no longer available.

I genuinely think that InfluxDB needs to take some unplanned and possibly
rather expensive steps to reinstate the customer data which has been affected
by this appalling lack of communication, so that people can continue running
their services on-premises, at another hosting location, or with another
provider.

As @Viktor_ingemarsson put it very succinctly: “data loss is not an acceptable
option” and I think InfluxDB has to address that promptly and comprehensively.

Antony.

4 Likes

Was this posted on the stage page with deletion starting 2 minutes after that? Some would argue that’s not enough notice…

Scheduled
Posted 5 days ago. Jul 05, 2023 - 13:06 UTC

In progress
Posted 5 days ago. Jul 05, 2023 - 13:08 UTC

Our operations are directly affected by the closure of these facilities and we are deeply troubled that we received zero prior notification (no emails or UI notifications). At the very least, we expect the ability to recover our data.

@Jay_Clifford we look forward to updates and (hopefully) a timely resolution.

On our end this affects as well directly our operations.
We received no email, no notifications.
I completely agree that it is unacceptable that we can’t even have access to our data.
@Jay_Clifford please provide quickly how we can achieve this data recovery.

If someone lost data and was/is on a paid plan, they should get a backup from Influx ASAP (hope they do).

As for the free plan - if you put your production servers on the free plan service - well it sucks but what are you surprised.

Is there also a way to get the backup that Influx supposedly does? Just thinking about the future :wink:

“if you put your production servers on the free plan service - well it sucks
but what are you surprised.”

This may be a reasonable statement, but it still strikes me that InfluxDB
should be making a significant effort to re-build a reputation as a responsible
and professional outfit, not only with everybody who’s been directly affected by
this, but as a brand statement in general.

Otherwise there are going to be lots of discussions in the months to come
along the lines of “how about we use InfluxDB?” “hm, weren’t those the guys
who turned off a server and deleted a whole bunch of people’s data?” "oh, yeah

  • who else can we use?"

Antony.

1 Like

I agree and didn’t want to sound like Influx didn’t do anything wrong - the way it was done wasn’t good example for others and I’m really curious how they gonna resolve that.

I received a response from their support and it’s hillarious.

TLDR: “We don’t plan to delete your data again in the forseeable future”

Full quote: “You can sign up for a new account here InfluxDB Cloud using a different region. We want to assure you that there are no more scheduled shutdowns planned. Therefore, once you have created the new account and begin writing to it, we do not foresee any data loss going forward”

1 Like

Hi all, please see the official response from Paul with regards to the situation:

What happens now?

Our engineering team is looking into whether they can restore the last 100 days of data for GCP Belgium. It appears at this time that for AWS Sydney users, the data is no longer available.

Users can reach out to our support team (support@influxdata.com) and we will begin the data retrieval and recovery process.

Paul has posted this personally in the Slack channel here. If you have questions about the next steps please comment there.

I will pick this thread back up in the morning.

Again my apologies to those that have been affected by the situation.

I have just one more question to Influx Team / Support:
Why Influx didn’t migrate data from discontinued region to any other near by region and redirect traffic from discontinued region? I have many services and majority of them would do this this way over just “discontinue and scrap”

It’s been 24 hours since I noticed our data had been deleted, and I’m still in denial about it. Multiple people from InfluxData had to make incredibly…unusual decisions for this to happen.

It’s possible people who opted out of marketing/other emails from them did not receive these notices.

Hi @Jerry1333,
Unfortunately, it’s currently not a simple process for us to merge thousands of users into new clusters. We helped manually move many of our customers who asked to move across to a new cluster. We also have to be careful legally for certain regions such as Belgium as this can be in direct violation of GDPR. Again no amount of excuses or explanations will now solve the damage caused. We are trying our best to help anyone whos been effected to continue with us if they wish to.

Hi @RoyalBlock,
If you need any support in data recovery if your using the Belgium region let me know.

Sydney unfortunately. Any updates on accessing data that was in that region?

Unfortunately @RoyalBlock at this time it does look like the data is lost for Sydney. We are still looking into it but I am 90% sure this is sadly the case.