AWS accused of a ‘digital execution’ after it deleted 10 years of users' data without warning — software engineer details “complete digital annihilation” at the hands of AWS admins, claims false excuses given for account deletion

A software engineer has warned against trusting cloud data storage services in a painstakingly detailed blog post detailing their own “complete digital annihilation” at the hands of AWS admins. Developer Abdelkader Boudih, pen name Seuros, says they had been a fee-paying AWS subscriber for a decade, with the cloud service becoming a firm part of their workflow. Suffice to say, the developer’s long-standing relationship with AWS has now ended acrimoniously.

Boudih says lots of important data has been lost, including a complete programming book, electronics tutorials, and years of unpublished code. Boudih admits that “AWS wasn’t just my backup—it was my clean room for open source development.” In other words, it was a tidy repository away from the “chaos” of the desktop. The dev reckons AWS’s multi-region replication and architecture should have been his backup…

Interestingly, Boudih claims they subsequently got a tip from an ‘AWS insider’ indicating that all their data was wiped due to a simple syntax error during a customer account audit, and all the correspondence Boudih had received about account verification was just a smokescreen.

It started with an innocuous verification request

On Thursday, July 10, Boudih received a verification request with a 5-day response deadline (countdown time included the weekend). Then follows a tale as old as time, where there are delays and escalations, verification ID requests, canned responses from the service provider not addressing actual queries, and so on. By July 23, Boudih was rocked as he received an “account terminated” notification.

Over the next few days of template-driven dialog with an AWS service team rep, Boudih was starting to worry that their data had also been rendered into “digital ashes.” Indeed, Boudih found out it had been wiped, and in the interim, reasonable requests for read-only access had been ignored. “Because the account verification wasn’t completed by this date, the resources on the account were terminated,” wrote an AWS rep or bot. Then they asked for a 5-star review…

Boudih highlights that this “20 day support nightmare” doesn’t seem to tally with AWS’s public policy of putting closed accounts on ice for 90 days, during which they “can be reopened and data is retained,” according to service provider documentation. However, Boudih’s account wasn’t voluntarily closed, but suspended by AWS for ‘verification failure,’ a procedure without public documentation.

'AWS insider' hints at a cover-up

We’ve already established that Boudih is a software engineer, but ironically, some of the open-source code segments Boudih has shared “probably run in AWS’s own infrastructure, making their systems more reliable.” Underlining the implications, the disgruntled dev added, “And they deleted the very environment that created them.”

Due to Boudih's status in the open-source community, Boudih says an AWS insider reached out with a fascinating backstory about what really happened in the AWS offices on or around July 20. According to this source, the initial verification request and suspension of the account were simply a smokescreen, as all Boudih’s data had already been wiped by accident.

Data extinction event

The theory that emerges is that a syntax difference between Ruby and Java scripting meant that when an AWS admin was “running some kind of proof of concept on ‘dormant’ and ‘low-activity’ accounts,” they accidentally wiped live accounts instead of executing a dry run to check the results. In Boudih’s words, “Java’s 1995-era parameter parsing turned a simulation into an extinction event.”

Boudih thinks that he wasn’t the only person affected by what he describes as a “cover up” at AWS MENA (Middle East & North Africa). The dev goes on to assert that AWS can’t just brush this customer off with scripted non-replies.

Now Boudih says they are “building a free tool to help people exodus from AWS,” as well as guiding clients worth $400k/month in AWS billing to migrate to services from Oracle OCI, Azure, and Google Cloud.

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