Twitter ‘smytes’ customers

Twitter today announced it was acquiring the “trust and safety as a service” startup Smyte to help it better address issues related to online abuse, harassment, spam, and security on its platform. But it also decided to immediately shut down access to Smyte’s API without warning, leaving Smyte’s existing customers no time to transition to a new service provider.

The change left Smyte’s current customer base stranded, with production issues related to the safety of their own platforms.

Needless to say, many were not happy about this situation and took to Twitter to register their complaints.

According to Smyte’s website, its clients included Indiegogo, GoFundMe, npm, Musical.ly, TaskRabbit, Meetup, OLX, ThredUp, YouNow, 99 Designs, Carousell, and Zendesk – big name brands that used Smyte’s feature set in a variety of ways to combat fraud, abuse, harassment, scams, spam, and other security issues.

While Twitter had earlier told TechCrunch that it would be “winding down” Smyte’s business with existing clients, what that apparently meant was that it was going to announce the acquisition, then effectively shut off the lights over at Smyte and leave everyone in the lurch.

According to reports from those affected, Smyte disabled access to its API with very little warning to clients, and without giving them time to prepare. Customers got a phone call, and then – boom – the service was gone. Clients had multi-year contracts in some cases.

And again, to reiterate, Smyte is a provider of anti-abuse and anti-fraud protections – not something any business would shut off overnight.

In npm’s case, it even led to a production outage.

Twitter declined to comment, but we understand it was making phone calls to affected Smyte customers today to match them with new service providers.

The decision to smite smyte an existing customer base the minute the startup joined Twitter isn’t a good look for either company, and is especially ironic in light of Twitter’s promises of “trust and safety” improvements in the months to come.

Trust, huh?

That’s how it works?

Holy shit Twitter bought Smyte and immediately shut it down. We had a 3 years contract with them and they just disappeared overnight. No communication at all, they just turned their servers off, closed our shared support channel and walked away. What the actual fuck

— Giacomo (@arthens) June 21, 2018

»Trust and safety as a service«, they said. Now @Twitter owns @HelloSmyte, and trust is down the drain. Shutting down their services immediately, not giving their customers any grace period to adjust. Thought #Smyte was better than that #massivedisgrace 😡 https://t.co/ttXmLNg3qb

— Ekaterina Damer, PhD (@ekadamer) June 21, 2018

Wait…so did @HelloSmyte just shut down it's service entirely today with no warning after @Twitter bought them? What about their customers that rely on them for advanced moderation and the safety of their platforms? #smyte

— Michael (@MichaelEhinger) June 21, 2018

A vendor notified us of their acquisition at 6am this morning and shut down their APIs 30 minutes later, creating a production outage for npm (package publishes and user registrations). The sheer unprofessionalism of this is blowing my mind.

— Laurie Voss (@seldo) June 21, 2018

It takes weeks to negotiate and sign an acquisition. You didn't find out at 6am. You couldn't give us a week? Even a couple of hours to take your service out of our critical path and avoid an outage? Fucking shocking behavior.

— Laurie Voss (@seldo) June 21, 2018

https://twitter.com/jgoldschrafe/status/1009947081987878912

https://twitter.com/theredwarrior/status/1009896653191634945

from https://t.co/oarjqaRFlr:

"Twitter tells us that Smyte will wind down its operations with those customers including Indiegogo, GoFundMe, npm"

🤔🤔🤔🤔 https://t.co/5iCSzLP5D1

— recovering main character (@__anp__) June 21, 2018

Hey @HelloSmyte , it's a massive bummer that you couldn't give your customers any notice before turning everything off. Is there anything you can do to help us out?

— Dennis Hotson (@dennishotson) June 21, 2018

Thanks for just shutting off service at 615am this morning with 7 minutes notice.

— Curtis Schofield (@curtisjennings) June 21, 2018

https://twitter.com/kerryjunebug/status/1010015074310688768

Update, 6/22/18. 3:42 PM ET:

Twitter has released a statement regarding this situation, which was shared via the Twitter account of Mike Montano, VP of Twitter’s Engineering team, just now. He writes “There have been concerns around how we’re transitioning Smyte’s customers. We could have done better and are learning from this experience. Here’s the email I just sent to our team.”

The full email and tweet is below:

https://twitter.com/michaelmontano/status/1010246307984769024