IANAL, but my understanding is that threatening a class action lawsuit is easy, but actually bringing an action to court is extremely difficult. And (at least to me) this seems like an awfully weak case -- I don't see any obvious or intentional fraud.
The whole thing seems strange to me. I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here. If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long?
Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation had been 100% correct and instead the problem was just plain old slow I/O on Heroku's side?
> If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long?
We didn't know how bad the performance was because Heroku's tools (logs and New Relic) reported incorrect performance data (i.e., they said requests weren't queuing when they were actually spending a ton of time queuing)
EDIT:
> Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation had been 100% correct and instead the problem was just plain old slow I/O on Heroku's side?
To be clear, we have no official association with http://herokuclassaction.com/ or the lawyer behind it – I actually found out about the site from the article's author when he interviewed me for the story.
(But I do think Heroku owes its customers a refund)
I don't think the issues with New Relic was necessarily Heroku's problem. Sure, Heroku did have some outdated info on their website and their logs may not be fully accurate, but I personally don't think that they should provide refunds for that. Solving the problems that have been raised would be a better service to their customers. Providing refunds probably doesn't help Heroku create a better service which is what I think will matter long term.
Agreed, but it's not the one true monitoring system. I happen to be biased and think it's pretty good, but it's not a first-party monitoring system that they swore on a bible was correct.
Maybe they didn't swear on the bible, but when you use a tool from a company with which Heroku has a partnership, you expect that tool to give accurate readings. I would, at least.
This is a civil matter. Probably under torts law, especially if there's anything in California/US torts law that resembles Australia's tort of "misleading and deceptive conduct".
Fraud and torts are different. And to forestall the next obvious point: torts and contracts are different.
> I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here.
A refund.
Heroku's selling pitch is linear scalability. Rent 1 dyno, get ~ (1 dyno / Σ dynos) improvement in performance. Rap Genius demonstrated that they were getting exponentially worse increments of added performance per dyno added.
> If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long?
This is orthogonal to the question of whether Heroku acted in a legal way.
> Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation had been 100% correct and instead the problem was just plain old slow I/O on Heroku's side?
Courts don't worry their heads with strawman hypotheticals.
> "I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here."
Rap Genius isn't the ones doing the suing. Rap Genius wrote about it, which caused Heroku to come clean. I think Rap Genius already got what they hoped to get (i.e., exposure, official comment, etc).
> "I don't see any obvious or intentional fraud."
You don't need intent to be sued - you only need to have caused damages to the plaintiffs. What Heroku has effectively done was:
1 - misrepresented their product in a substantial way.
2 - "overcharged" their customers substantially by giving them less performance than they paid for.
Both of these are material damages, and there's a more than reasonable case for Heroku's customers to recover this money.
This isn't a criminal case here, there doesn't even have to be fraud (as defined in the criminal law context).
I think after reading the article, it is pretty clear they did not notice the routing issues until they noticed slowed down performance and till their consumers complained. That makes perfect sense, you don't really dig deep into routing until you hit a bottleneck, specially when you are unable to monitor it, and specially when your provider is lying to you about how they route.
A civil suit doesn't mean "you're a bad person." It means "we're not square." If you sold something with certain parameters and delivered less, even if you did it on accident you're not square with your customers, and even if your customer didn't notice you're not square with them.
The whole thing seems strange to me. I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here. If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long?
Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation had been 100% correct and instead the problem was just plain old slow I/O on Heroku's side?