I'm sad to see that HN is being used as a platform for this sort of demagogy, and sad that stories about this tawdry little tale are indiscriminately voted up above other stories which are far more interesting.<p>DDOS of a mailing service that lots of websites rely on because a completely unrelated company decided to fire someone is not an occasion for <i>lol</i> and <i>schadenfreude</i> as some posters here would have it. As a method of justice it has more in common with a lynch mob than a court of law - this isn't going to get the guy's job back, and it certainly isn't going to teach anyone a lesson, apart from that the internet is fickle, and monumentally stupid. But I very much doubt the people behind this attack are interested in justice or truly care about the man who lost his job, they're just doing it for the lolz and are punishing the internet at large over a silly little dispute at a tech conference.<p>Congratulations to the mob, I guess; it has shown its power, if not any sense of discrimination or proportionality.
This was a Heroku win for us. I just visited their add-ons page, identified a comparable provider, and restored mail in our application with the following:<p><pre><code> heroku addons:add mailgun:basic
heroku addons:docs mailgun:basic
vim config/initializers/mail.rb
git add config/initializers/mail.rb
git commit -m "Switching to back-up mail provider."
git push heroku master
</code></pre>
Since the account creation is all automatic and billing is all through Heroku, I never even had to visit Mailgun's website.
Even though I'm a SG customer, I can't help but feel a little schadenfreude.<p>edit: when I made this comment I thought this was a random service failure that would last couple of minutes. More than 1 hour later, I don't think it's that funny anymore as I'm being affected as well.
Sendgrid customer here.<p>Since many services rely on SMTP providers like Sendgrid, they should have a way to notify customers when their server go down and transactional notifications may be disrupted.<p>I shouldn't be notified by someone who know we're using Sendgrid and happen to read HN.
I'm just tuning in now, as I happened to see this here on HN and my company is a SendGrid customer (used for transactional emails).<p>Am I understanding this right - transactional emails for my company may be interrupted because of some random personal argument between two people?
I'm surprised PlayHaven hasn't shared the blame for their role in this whole thing. Adria, and by-extension, SendGrid shoulder some of the responsibility for what happened, but PlayHaven chose not to back their own employee.
As a SendGrid customer, I'm certainly glad I visit HN frequently and was able to find out about this. I'm surprised we weren't notified by them directly, though.
First we replaced SMTP that was distributed and designed to be resilient to outages (i.e. not lose messages) with proprietary HTTP APIs and now we complain that they don't notify us via email when they are down. Nice.<p>I am guilty of using SES myself, but it's sad to see email becoming increasingly centralized.