Obvious first question would be, have you fallen behind paying your bill? Most service providers will threaten to disrupt your service if you don't pay for the services they provide. I would expect you're months behind paying for service before they say: "if you don't pay us $128,000 by this Friday, we will shut [you down]."
On Saturday, August 13, 2016, HonorFirst Name Ethics via NANOG < nanog@nanog.org> wrote:
Question to the NANOG community, Is anyone else being extorted by Zayo? Is Zayo threatening shutdown over bogus and fabricated charges?
The purpose of this message to the group is twofold: 1) to share our experience being extorted by Zayo with the community and 2) to understand the depth and extent of Zayo's less than ethical behavior by getting feedback from the community.
Abovenet was a great organization with quality service, reasonable prices and nice folks to work with. Since being acquired by Zayo we have seen a significant degradation of service quality and responsiveness which is not unusual from a provider, but Zayo has taken things to a level of low ethics that would make Tony Soprano proud. Most interestingly they seem to identify points where you are dependent on them and threaten a shut down unless you pay them some arbitrary amount. In our case we use multiple Zayo IP, Transport, and Colo Services -- they set their extortion amount at $128,000. A completely arbitrary and fabricated number. They put significant pressure threatening to shut us down by setting their lawyers on us. Our detailed contract breakdowns, invoice and payment spreadsheets, along with all other commonsense and professional efforts were simply disregarded. At one point their lawyers and accounting people had the nerve to say "our accounting system does not track invoice details -- it only shows the total amount due so your numbers mean nothing to us." All the while they relentlessly levied disconnect threats with short timelines such as: "if you don't pay us $128,000 by this Friday, we will shut your operation down." We have had anecdotal feedback that we are not alone in our experience and that there are many more like us. If you and your company have had a similar experience with Zayo, please share it with the group or if like us you are concerned about retaliation from Zayo, please respond privately.
If the group shares their experiences the public shaming may drive Zayo to stop operating like mafia thugs. If the problem is as common as we suspect, it may warrant getting the Attorney General involved.
In the mean time, I strongly urge anyone already in a relationship with Zayo or considering a relationship to make sure your are well diversified with other more ethical carriers. Otherwise please consider another organization to work with. In our case we were better of with Ransomeware, than Zayo as a vendor! Its cheaper and less damaging
A Zayo victim and a NANOG Member
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