They blatantly lied about how a core part of their service worked for years. It was raised to them previously and they didn't change the docs nor the way their system worked.
This negatively affected a lot of their customers in many ways (overspending on heroku, time wasted, lost customers and revenue).
When Heroku's customers have incurred significant costs and/or losses because of Heroku's false claims, I don't see why this is so inappropriate. We need to make companies accountable for their claims.
For context, I am a Heroku customer and have been significantly affected by all of this. I won't participate in the lawsuit but I can understand why others would.
They didn't "blatantly lie"....they lied. They built their product 1 way and it morphed into another architecture as they grew. They made decisions that optimized for their financial benefit, but I wouldn't go as far as to say they "blatantly lied". Let's not get too carried away here.
As a long time Heroku user, I was pissed when I heard this...but they have done so much good for my own development career and freelance gigs, that this is easily forgiveable with a slap on the wrist and a partial refund to customers that have paid a lot over the years.
More than likely, they just never realized how big of a deal it was - because they were busy expanding. A few customers (few being relative to their total support requests) probably did inquire and some manager probably developed the response that they are aware of the problem, but not dealing with it right now.
It's not as if they built the company on the premise that they are going to say 1 thing and do something else.
This is just something that fell through the cracks as they grew.
Offering, and charging money for, a monitoring tool (New Relic) that doesn't monitor a very important part of the Heroku request cycle is pretty blatant. It was probably pretty profitable too!
I agree completely, it's not like "intelligent routing" is some standardized feature that people have come to expect from Heroku. What people expected was that their app could scale easily on Heroku which as it happens was not strictly true, but to some extent below some threshold it was probably true for most people. People here keep showing a poor understanding of the basics of queueing theory and system administration, as if "intelligent routing" is something they purposely removed just to screw people over.
Think of it like this, if a food restaurant has a vegetarian burger on the menu. After a while they find that as they grow they can't keep producing the burger that way anymore. So they decide to use a beef product in the burger, but they don't tell anyone. They just keep selling it as a vegetarian burger. Do you think that is blatantly lying? I don't see a lot of difference here.
This negatively affected a lot of their customers in many ways (overspending on heroku, time wasted, lost customers and revenue).
When Heroku's customers have incurred significant costs and/or losses because of Heroku's false claims, I don't see why this is so inappropriate. We need to make companies accountable for their claims.
For context, I am a Heroku customer and have been significantly affected by all of this. I won't participate in the lawsuit but I can understand why others would.