This is what scares me, is social media the only way to get things sorted out nowadays? What if I don't have a large following nor an account in the first place, do I have to stomach the bill?
This is exactly what happened to me during Covid... I had a flight that got cancelled at the beginning of the pandemic since the country closed the orders (essentially). A year after, still on lock downs and et al, I wanted to enquire about a refund, for months I got not answer, until I caught wind that people using Twitter were actually getting results. Now, I don’t use social media at all, so I had to create a Twitter account, twit about my case et voila! 30 mins after I got a response and they send me a PM with a case number... Not even going to mention the airline, but it is infuriating...
Someone at a community group I'm in messed up playing with Azure through their free for non-profits offering^. We were out about 1.2k€. Not huge but huge for us.
Encouraged by comments on HN over the years I had them ask support to kindly to wave it. After repeating the request a few times they eventually reduced their bill to <100€ but refused to wave it entirely.
So even without shaming on social media, But it probably depends. It's worth at least asking.
Once you're in a contract + TAM territory, pricing works very differently. Also, temporary experiments and usage overruns become an interesting experience where the company may just forget to bill you a few thousands $ just because nobody looked at the setup recently. Very different situation to a retail user getting unexpected extra usage.
Does it really happen to really have to pay such a bill? Do you need to tweet about it to be reimbursed?