Their original action may have been a mistake. This poor response isn't. They don't take full responsibility for the error. Instead they blame a reasonable interpretation of their words as an incorrect and highlight a positive contradictory portion. It's a bad look for Vultr.
So it turns out they've had these clauses in their ToS for a while now. The user who initially posted this on reddit was unable to access their account until they accepted the new ToS, which they probably didn't because they assumed this provision gave Vultr access to their data in a way they thought they hadn't already.
I'd love to know what did in that ToS though.
I think cloud providers (maybe all services really) should be required to provide some amount of notice of changes which the user will lose access to their data without accepting. Also would be really nice when providing said notice if they also included a diff from the last version the user had already accepted.
Prior HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836495
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39857680
This Vulture scandal reminds me of an old anecdote about car mechanic. It's a translation, so it doesn't sound as nice as original.
After getting invoice from car mechanic, a client goes over itemized list of parts and work, and in the middle sees an item called "it didn't fly - 10000". Client asks mechanic "What is this "it didn't fly" thing?". Mechanic sighs and says "Oh, well, it didn't fly. Removing.".