off-prem
An expired card, overzealous spam filter, and broken authenticator create havoc with a very clear moral
Nothing can ruin the end of a week like finding out that all of the websites and hosted email you’re responsible for are offline, which is exactly what happened to Christopher Bradbury and his web design and development firm, Digital Takumi last week. AWS has since resolved the situation, but Bradbury's mistakes can serve as a useful lesson to others of what not to do.As Bradbury explained to The Register in an email, he noticed last Thursday, July 16, that all the websites and Google Workspace email accounts connected to domains he manages were offline. All of those sites are hosted through Route 53, AWS’ combined DNS/hosting service, and none of them were resolving. Bradbury went digging through his emails to figure out if there was anything to point to the failures, and sure enough: In his spam folder were numerous messages from AWS telling him a payment card on file had expired, and warning him that the account used to host all those customer websites through Route 53 was going to be suspended unless he took action. He didn’t obviously, because he didn’t realize there was an issue.
