Linode charges displaying as Akamai Technologies

Thanks for the update. Might have been helpful to send out a notice before the fact… would have saved me a few moments of panic thinking about all the bills I'd have to go update after cancelling my CC =]

Cheers!

No, I had not been aware of the acquisition.

I got an email notification for the credit card charge. I called Akamai's billing support to ask why they charged me, and they told me it's fraud. They said they've been getting a lot of calls today about these fraudulent charges, and recommended I call my credit card company to contest the charge.

After the call, I noticed that the dollar amount is the same as my Linode invoice, and found the acquisition news and this forum post.

I find it shocking that no email was sent out in advance to warn us of this situation. The fact that Akamai's billing support was in dark about the acquisition, and that they're telling everyone it's fraud, is a rather bad indicator of their culture.

I fear this is Linode's death knell.

I fear this is Linode's death knell.

I sure hope not.

But I can't think of one small company that was very, very good at what it did and had strong customer loyalty that was bought by a larger company and maintained (much less improved) the previous level of service and customer satisfaction.

Can anyone name such a company?

Take a look at some of the ISPs (Small Orange, Bluehost, etc) that EIG has taken over in the past several years. Are any of them as as good as they were?

I'll be researching alternatives… such as D.O, Vultr… the only ones I know about now. (Are there others?)

If the past is prologue, service will decline, pricing will increase, and the Linode we've known will not the Linode we will have in the near future as the new parent company takes over.

YMMV.

I'll be researching alternatives… such as D.O, Vultr… the only ones I know about now. (Are there others?)

@acanton77: Linode maintains a list of alternatives, at least until Akamai takes it down.

Well this was just plain STUPID and unlike Linode. I received NO email regarding this change and only this morning, after billing did I notice a small message at the top of my dashboard telling me about AKAMAI… unfortunately AFTER I'd checked my bank transactions. So, naturally when I saw this appear as a debit in my bank, and knowing I had nothing to do with AKAMAI I cancelled my card and moved my money to a different account. Anyone with a living brain cell in today's climate of fraud would (or should) do the same.

While I searched for AKAMAI on the net I did not see anything about Linode being acquired by them as I wasn't looking for that. I simply went to the AKAMAI website and determined I had nothing to do with them.

Now I have to notify all my subscriptions that used that card and inform them my payments will be delayed until I have a new card in about a week.

Is this a forewarning of what Linode is to become… doing stupid things like this? EVERY ACCOUNT with Linode should have been sent an email regarding this change… AHEAD OF BILLING!

@acanton77
@bryankaplan

Not a very encouraging list… surely, keep away from AWS whatever you do! Same for Alibaba Cloud.

I develop for the net and host most of my clients. Before Linode and even before high speed broadband I hosted on a server from my bedroom and it did just fine. Maybe I'll get a static IP and go back to that!

Agree that @Linode should notify all users by email before they start applying the change. I received the email about the acquisition, but there is none about the display name change. I have to start a new payment since the original transaction was cancelled automatically by my bank.

If the past is prologue, service will decline, pricing will increase, and the Linode we've known will not the Linode we will have in the near future as the new parent company takes over.

I hope this doesn't come true, and Linode staff can read this thread.

"As you know…"

Nope, didn't. Always admired Linode's quality of service and independence from the monolithic web powerhouses. I really hope this assumption isn't representative of the approach to service going forward.

yeah, would have appreciated a heads up about this via email too before it happened

same as above, was reviewing statement and thought - wtf is this?

I had filed a support ticket with Linode after I reported the charge as fraudulent and then called my credit card company to renig on the fraud claim once I realized it was Linode (fortunately before they shut the card down - crisis averted).

The customer support representative who replied to me indicated that this change was not supposed to have happened this month (it was upcoming but wasn't supposed to have happened yet) so it caught them by surprise as well. There's not much the support folks can do after the fact but apologize though :|

With the number of people who likely reported the charge as fraudulent I suspect it cost them a lot of money this month though.

How dum is this I mean common, i get woken by my wife having almost having a heart attach, we have a billing unknown from "Akamai Technologies" and I am like what is that? in my sleep, getting up have to find out all kind of stuff about a company who apparently are a CDN company and I know i never used it? and we speak abort cancelling credit cards and all kind of things, until I see this thread searching for "Akamai Technologies unknown billing", thank you google for showing this as your first search suggestion, I always loved linode, but giving people heart attack, coz you cant figure out sending a simple mail warning me, for me in the future everything is Upcloud or Hetzner, if that is how the new company owners are, then this is a goodbye for me

Hey folks – for clarity, we've updated our payment descriptor one additional time.

You can expect to see "Linode*Akamai" on your bank or credit card statement going forward.

We've also included some additional details so it's absolutely clear who you're paying – if you expand the details of the transaction, you should see:

Linode*Akamai (609) 380-7100 linode.com

This string might be rendered differently depending on your financial institution, but the details should broadly be the same.

We understand the impact this change had on all of our customers and we're sorry for any trouble this caused you. This was the result of a human error at our payment processor, not anyone's decision at Linode or Akamai.

The answer at the top of this thread has been updated with this information.

I'm certainly glad I found this page because a few minutes ago I found a payment listed to "AKAMAI TECHNOLOGIE US" for 2022-07-04 and had no idea what it could be.

…I just checked my emails for any announcement of this. Actually I found an email dated 2022-07-01 that said: 'Please note that charges will appear as "Linode" on your credit card's statement'.

There is another email dated 2022-08-01: 'Please note that charges will appear as "Linode*Akamai" on your credit card's statement'. No explanation, no clarification, no apology. Good grief.

It appears that the outcome of this mess is that many Linode customers have reported these unknown transactions as fraud, and as a result Mastercard have added the Linode merchant account to a high-risk fraud register and Mastercard payments are now being declined because they are high risk of fraud.

Well done Akamai!