InfluxData Removes Cloud Service from Belgium and Australia, Customers Lose Data

InfluxData has discontinued its InfluxDB Cloud service from Belgium and Australia, resulting in customers losing their data. According to the company, economic reasons led to the decision to discontinue the service on June 30, and customers were informed of this decision on February 23, April 6, and May 15.
However, customers have reported that they were unaware of the discontinuation of services in Belgium, and their data was deleted immediately after the lockdown of the Belgian regions, causing problems and panic.

Communication Issues

Paul Dix, CTO of InfluxData, has admitted that the company did not go to great lengths to ensure that all users were aware of the reports and acted on them. He writes in a blog post that customers were notified of the decision through various channels, but in hindsight, it was too optimistic to assume that the emails, a sales notification and a web notification would be sufficient.
Unfortunately, when the cloud service was shut down, all data went up in smoke simultaneously. Now that customers missed the memo about the end of service, organizations are at a loss. The blog cannot allay the concerns: “Our technical team is investigating whether they can recover the last 100 days of data for GCP Belgium. It currently appears that for AWS Sydney users, the data is no longer available.”

Improving Communication

Dix says the organization has learned from this and communication will improve in the future. Customers who had unsubscribed from the newsletter already did not receive the notification in their inbox. Customers who continued to work diligently on the service during the last month received no additional notification to verify that they had been informed. The company did not do a “scream test”, a test in which all users are excluded from the service, but the data is retained if customers suddenly ask in panic why they no longer have access. Finally, the company did not place a banner on key company websites about the upcoming changes.
InfluxData’s decision to discontinue its InfluxDB Cloud service from Belgium and Australia has caused customers to lose their data. The company has admitted that communication was not sufficient, and they have learned from this experience to improve communication in the future.