I find that story really hard to believe. In a company the size of Amazon, I can't imagine a rogue employee running a tool that can willy-nilly wipe out customers' data without several levels of manager approval.

Besides, what would be the potential benefit of such a hypothetical script? The author mentions "a bill under $200," so that's the upper limit on how much it costs AWS to keep the author's whole data. If I was working there and a coworker said "Hey I created a script that can save the company $200 by finding a defunct (but paying) customer and wiping out their data!", I'd have replied "What the fuck is wrong with you."

The idea of a rogue AWS team running a deletion script without oversight should sound ridiculous. At a company that size of AWS, you will expect guardrails, audits, approvals.

But here is the thing: no one from AWS has given me an official explanation. Not during the 20-day support hell, not after termination, not even when I asked directly: “Does my data still exist?” Just a slow drip of templated replies, evasions, and contradictions.

An AWS insider did reach out claiming it was an internal test gone wrong, triggered by a misused --dry flag and targeting At a company that size, you'd expect guardrails, audits, approvals low-activity accounts.

According to them, the team ran it without proper approval. Maybe it is true. Maybe they were trying to warn me. Maybe its a trap to get me to throw baseless accusations and discredit myself.

I'm not presenting that theory as fact. I don’t know what happened behind the wall.

What I do know is:

- My account was terminated without following AWS’s own 90-day retention policy

- I had a valid payment method on file

- Support stonewalled every direct question for 20 days

- No answers were provided, even post-mortem