I occasionally help clients with basic cloud tasks such as S3 and EC2. A new client recently transferred data out of S3 to another provider without realizing the transfer would incur roughly $4,000 in egress charges. We stopped the transfers as soon as the issue was noticed, but the charges had already accumulated. I opened a billing support case to ask whether any courtesy credits might be available, since similar requests had worked for me once or twice before. After about 14 days, the case still has not been assigned to a person. The only response was an automated message that essentially repeated my original request, and I replied asking for a human review. Is this kind of delay typical, especially for a billing case on a newer account?
3 Answers
Support normally handles cases in the order they arrive, and response times depend heavily on current case volume. Since the account was only a few days old and the amount was a few thousand dollars, it may not have been prioritized even though the situation is important to the customer.
The support plan makes a big difference. If the account only has basic support, billing requests may take considerably longer to receive attention. Business-level support generally provides faster response targets, while billing cases under basic support can sit for quite a while.
Billing cases can take longer than technical support cases, but two weeks without a human response does seem unusually slow. Case volume and major billing-related incidents can create a backlog, so it may simply be waiting in a lower-priority queue.
That makes sense. The client did not sign up for a paid support plan, and this was also my first time handling a billing case for them. The request was submitted during a particularly busy period, so there may be a backlog.