Lost all my sites overnight: Vercel terminated my account without notice

26 points by hikerell 266 days ago | 22 comments

This week, my Vercel account was suddenly disabled and all of my deployments and data were deleted.

I received no warning, no suspension notice, and no post-action explanation. When I emailed their support to ask what happened, they refused to give a reason and simply said they wouldn’t restore the account or data.

I’ve been a Vercel user for over two years and never had any issue until now. It’s honestly shocking to lose everything overnight without a single email or warning.

I’m now migrating all my projects to Cloudflare, but the experience has been incredibly frustrating. I just want to understand why this happened — and whether anyone else has faced a similar sudden ban.

Has anyone here managed to get a clear answer from Vercel in a situation like this?

hikerell 262 days ago |

My issue has been resolved today:

1. After 10 days of communication with Vercel, the platform has unblocked my account and websites, and provided the specific explanation I expected.

2. One of my websites remains blocked because a page on it has a DMCA issue, while the other websites have been unblocked.

3. Over these 10 days, I have migrated some of my websites to Cloudflare, which was not an easy process. Technically, it involved migrating from Next.js to Open Next.js, requiring modifications and testing of a significant amount of code.

4. If anyone is interested, I can share my experience with the technical migration as well as the communication process with Vercel.

5. I would like to express my gratitude for everyone's suggestions at all times.

jimrandomh 265 days ago |

There are some types of legal action that service providers can get, which both force the service provider from droppig you, and also forbid the service provider from telling you why or what has happened. Eg, this happens in banking with SARs; when they drop a client for suspected money laundering, not only can't they tell that to the client, they can't even tell their own support agents.

I don't know anything about your sites or your activities, but based on the behavior described, something like this has probably happened to you.

hikerell 265 days ago | |

Thanks! I didn’t know any of this—learned something new.

altairprime 265 days ago |

Which of your products do you view as most likely to have led to the termination?

I don’t mean, which do you agree or consider just cause for leading to it. But as the operator of them, you are best positioned to estimate which one(s) a risk-avoidant corporation would be most likely reacting to, and knowing more about your actual circumstances would be valuable anecdata for others trying to help (as well as those reconsidering Vercel!).

hikerell 265 days ago | |

I'm not entirely sure about the cause, but here are some possibilities:

1. I run a SaaS browser extension that lets users export table data from any website. It can bypass some download restrictions, and I’m not sure if this has ever caused complaints.

2. A few months ago, I launched a free expired-domain valuation tool. It identified some high-value domains abandoned by governments and international organizations, as well as domains linked to gambling and scams. I’m not sure if any of this may have breached regulations.

Oscar_Hall 264 days ago | | |

I've had a similar frustrating experience with Vercel. My old projects, which I haven't maintained in ages but still get user traffic, kept nagging me to upgrade Next.js versions. Eventually, they just shut them down without much warning. It seems like Vercel is pushing hard on updates and compliance—maybe related to the regulatory issues you mentioned? Migrating to something more flexible like Cloudflare or self-hosting helped me. Anyone else dealing with forced upgrades on legacy stuff?

gaws 264 days ago | | |

> 1. I run a SaaS browser extension that lets users export table data from any website. *It can bypass some download restrictions*, and I’m not sure if this has ever caused complaints.

It seems like we found the problem. Someone likely filed a DMCA request directly with Vercel and the company complied.

runjake 266 days ago |

This is one reason why I avoid Next.js. Don't design your future projects around specific platforms. Things happen. Make sure you can pick up your code and go somewhere else.

Edit: Strange I would get so many downvotes for this. Care to explain? I think the effective Next.js lock-in is well documented. Yeah you can technically run it on arbitrary platforms with substantial work and continued maintenance, but you're working against the tide.

hikerell 266 days ago | |

Next.js was once very useful to me, and now I am converting all my projects to Open NextJs.

raw_anon_1111 265 days ago | |

I agree. There are too many platforms these days that support just uploading a Docker container. You can take those anywhere.

slacktivism123 265 days ago | |

>Strange I would get so many downvotes for this. Care to explain?

The terminally online developer cares very much about signaling his love of artisanal webshit. He makes his chosen flavor of the month JavaScript framework, and by extension, the "platform" used to host it, part of his identity. Maybe his favorite mustachioed "influencer" shills it on YouTube with a coupon code for 50% off your first month, or maybe an idol with 700k Twitter followers says it's the framework (and not his fanboys) that makes him $200k monthly passive income from side projects. Branded laptop stickers are a guarantee, maybe even a hoodie. So when he encounters a rational, level-headed observation like yours, he takes it as a jab at his beloved Vercel Inc., benevolent maintainer of Next.js valued at $3.25bn with the best customer support in the industry, and hits "downvote". His job is done.

Mariosheep 260 days ago |

Just port your vercel projects to github

brudgers 266 days ago |

Maybe Vercel is pivoting away from your use case to focus on larger organizations.

Maybe Vercel lost the data.

Maybe Vercel saw a regulatory issue.

My advice is to keep building on a different platform.

Good luck.

hikerell 266 days ago | |

Thank you for your concern. Some of the websites have been restored and are now running on Cloudflare.

brudgers 266 days ago | | |

For what it is worth, according to Wikipedia, Vercel uses Cloudflare.

leakycap 266 days ago |

What a disappointment to hear

More and more companies have zero meaningful support when things go sideways

I'm guessing one or more of your sites allowed user-uploads in some fashion or another and someone put a file that is hash-flagged in a serious manner

hikerell 265 days ago | |

There is indeed an upload feature, but users’ avatars, files, and other uploads aren’t shared with the community—they can only be accessed by the users themselves.

What I find hardest to understand is: if there’s an issue with a website, why shut down all of my sites?

leakycap 265 days ago | | |

User-uploads are the #1 cause of this if the developer is not doing anything otherwise against TOS. Users will upload things you don't expect in ways you don't program for. And the files they upload can be immediately spotted by any big storage provider due to the known file hashes.

So, when you do relaunch with another service provider, I recommend putting all user-uploads on a system that sanitizes/reviews the file before saving and therefore it would never allow a file in with a known hash flag.

The experience you're having is a reason to choose use a hosting provider that allows multiple user account per human/company. (Many providers have a very strict limit of one account per human/business and enforce sub-accounts.)

As you're seeing, an issue on one sub-account or site can sometimes bring down an entire account and all related sites.

Hope you are provided backups, they likely do have them, but you may need a lawyer to get more info and you'd need to get in touch before the typical backups get rolled over/deleted.