A few weeks ago many users of the vendor Epsilon issued a pathetic apology for the potential leak of customer information.  In complete contrast Amazon Web Services (AWS) made a substantial  apology for the outage they experienced.

Not only did AWS apologize for what happened, they went into excruciating detail to explain what happened, AND they refunded all customers beyond the time of the outage–even those not affected.

For customers with an attached EBS volume or a running RDS database instance in the affected Availability Zone in the US East Region at the time of the disruption, regardless of whether their resources and application were impacted or not, we are going to provide a 10 day credit equal to 100% of their usage of EBS Volumes, EC2 Instances and RDS database instances that were running in the affected Availability Zone. These customers will not have to do anything in order to receive this credit, as it will be automatically applied to their next AWS bill. Customers can see whether they qualify for the service credit by logging into their AWS Account Activity page

They hit all the high notes on the things I’m looking for:

  • Apologize
  • Show me you mean it by giving me something
  • Demonstrate how seriously you take the situation.

Great job Amazon!

Image by Peter Harding via flickr used under a Creative Commons license.