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The link to Slack in this post by "developer advocate" Jay Clifford is a rabbit hole worth diving into a bit: https://community.influxdata.com/t/getting-weird-results-fro...

Find your way into that Slack workspace via https://www.influxdata.com/blog/introducing-our-new-influxda... and you'll discover some interesting things:

* That the only reason being given in that thread for the shutdown is "The region did not get enough usage or growth to make it economically viable to operate, so it became necessary for InfluxData to discontinue service in those regions.". i.e. there's no regulatory issue here like other answers speculated - just pure cost-cutting.

* That on July 5th, a couple of hours before they started shutting everything down (based on the shutdown timeline at https://status.influxdata.com/), that same "Developer Advocate" announced that they were suspending their live "office hours" sessions for July.

* Multiple people are asking for help after finding that they can't connect and getting ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the way of support from the company. It's literally falling to _other users_ to tell them that all their data is gone.

* One person chiming in, Matthew Allen, DID have a colleague who saw the notification email, but notes that...

- it was a pain for him to migrate has data to a different region due to InfluxDB Cloud's rate limiting, but that he did it anyway

- ... but that the documented migration process doesn't seem to have worked properly anyway (given that some of his data points have ended up as nulls)

- plus on top of all of THAT, even after doing everything he was supposed to do, he still can't log into influx cloud after the migration because when he logs in he gets automatically redirected to the no-longer-existing cluster and hits an error screen

What a clusterfuck. Shame on everyone from Influx who had a hand in this - the CTO Paul Dix who's turned up here on Hacker News to blame his customers for Influx's negligence, Jay Clifford the Developer Advocate for a spectacular failure of developer advocacy, and anyone else on the team who was close to this and didn't push for brownouts, blog posts, a mention in the newsletter, retention of data for some window after the final shutdown date, or any of the other obvious measures that could've made this less of a catastrophe. The multiple people noting that they were able to receive the company's newsletter but did not receive the notification that it was about to delete all their data tell me everything I need to know about this company and its priorities. I will never willingly do business with them again (although we used them at a startup I worked at once) and will advocate against any time I hear a colleague suggest using them.




Don't blame the developer advocate for the company's mistakes. Developer advocates rarely have any part in these kinds of decisions, but are left holding the bag whenever they go badly.




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