InfluxDB Deletes Data Too Soon, Thinks People Read Emails

Posted on Saturday, Jul 22, 2023 by Ned Bellavance

Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week

Let’s be honest. There’s probably a dozen or so vendor emails that you get every week, and you routinely do one of three things.

1. Leave them unread with every intention of getting back to them after your coffee break.
2. Shunt them into a folder that is never viewed and causes you stress because of the ever growing number of unread items it contains
3. Delete on sight from your inbox and your mind.

If InfluxDB was one of those vendors, then you may have woken up on July 1st to discover your data was gone.

The time-series database as a service company had determined that for economic reasons it was going to discontinue service in two regions, AWS Sydney and GCP Belgium. It tried to notify existing customers via email, documentation, website notifications, and sales outreach. Apparently not everyone got the message.

After shutting down the two regions, they were inundated with folks being like WTF? Even worse, while some data is recoverable in the GCP region, the AWS data is gone for good.

It’s one thing to pull the plug on a service. It’s quite another to also delete all the data. One would think that InfluxDB would be able to see active customer traffic to those regions and actively reach out to those customers to assist in migration.

But you’ve gotta admire the hutzpah of the hard delete on customer data. Unless, of course, you’re one of the impacted customers.