Hi everyone. My name is Matthew and I’m a Developer Support Engineer here at Particle. I work alongside David ( @ParticleD ) to support all the great people that use Particle’s ecosystem.
I’m sure a lot of you have been seeing David and me posting frequently in the community. While David and I work closely with Particle’s engineering team to work through any issues that come in through our internal ticketing system, we recognize that often times, there are many questions that can be answered by our community as well by sharing their own insights or experiences in the Particle world.
Therefore, as we are able, we like to pitch in and join in on community discussions to offer our assistance–especially for concerns that require an understanding of Particle’s backend and may require interactions with the engineers that built parts of the backend ecosystem.
As it so happens, we recently ran into one of these issues earlier last month. Some customers began experiencing an issue where they saw their SIMs pausing early
SIM pausing and double billing
As a result of our investigation, it appears that one of our MVNO partners recently updated the way data records are handled. As such, for a limited period, some records were being accounted for twice for a subset of users. This may have caused some SIMs to pause around prematurely.
It’s believed that the embedded SIMs in the E Series LTE, Boron 2G/3G, and Boron LTE could have been affected by this. It is not believed that our external SIM (such as the ones provided with the Electron) and were affected.
There also were a few identified customers that may have been charged twice. All identified customers have received refunds for this. If you believe you were one of the affected customers but did not receive a refund, please reach out to support and reference this post along with your invoice, specifying which ICCIDs you think were double-billed for.
Other users also saw that their SIMs were pausing at approximately half their data limit. This is due to the function representing data in the console interpreting the duplicate records differently. As it so happened, the console actually properly reflected data usage, while the pausing mechanism was seeing the duplicate records and counting them both. The short term fix was to raise the data cap. An actual fix on the backend has been implemented for all new usage data coming in and our engineering team has gone through and removed all duplicated data for past usage. All devices should be able to be set back to their proper data limits. As a note: Not all customers may have had a billing cycle occur while duplicate records were in the database. As a result, even if you experienced this issue, it is not necessarily the case that you will have been or will be double billed.
At this time, we believe that the record handling has been resolved an should be back to normal. All affected customers should no longer be experiencing issues. For general questions and concerns, please feel free to ask them here in this topic. If you happen to have a question about a specific device ID or ICCID and would like to not disclose private information, consider filing a support ticket
Borons not completing setup flow, reporting empty ICCID and IMEI
In addition to the above issue, we also have recently investigated another issue hat has come to our attention. This issue is a concern with Borons failing to go through the full setup flow. These Borons are typically known to also not report their ICCID or IMEI when performing a particle identify command from the CLI.
This is an issue that was discovered which left the NCP in a half initialized state. A pull request detailing this in more technical detail can be found on our Github repository.
This issue will not occur on all Borons, nor will it occur 100% of the time. Doing full restarts on a device experiencing symptoms can have it come up with a fully initialized NCP. In this state, it will function as intended.
This bug fix was not released in our v0.9.0 release, but we are seeking to have it in our next release. For users impacted by this issue, we ask that you wait for the next release and update as soon as possible once a fix is out.
For any issues not yet mentioned
As Particle continues to grow and add more features and products–unfortunately, bugs will be inevitable. But we are dedicated to being able to quickly identify and resolve these by working with our community and engineering team.
If you don’t see something mentioned here or in our Particle Mesh Known Issues and Fixes, always feel free to reach out here or at our support portal. At the moment, we are currently working with a slightly higher than normal ticket volume, so do expect a little while longer before we are able to handle your request.
And if it makes sense, always feel free to use our community too! Community posts are great from getting feedback from both your peers and us at Particle. Even if you aren’t sure if your issue can be solved right away, it does help to know others are experiencing the issue. This can help both support and engineering in their investigations to determine a cause and get a fix out more quickly.
As always, if you have any questions, always feel free to reach out. Just remember, we’re here for you! 
