Hello,
A couple of months ago I created an APEX instance on the OCI Free tier. I created an APEX application for testing/prototyping and have logged in the instance at least every 3 days.
Yesterday (and today), I tried to log into it but I got an error:
The server instance or database seemed switched off for some reason. So I headed to the Tenancy Explorer to check on the database, and in fact it shows it is stopped:
I clicked on it, and strangely the database information is not showing. Also, under More Actions, the 'Restart' and all other options are greyed out, so I cannot restart the database.
When I click on Check Database Availability I'm shown the following errors:
I understand that the free trial period has now expired, but as far as I know, this free tier account will still remain available with all its free services and resources. Quoting Oracle:
If your Always Free Autonomous Database has no activity for a period of 7 consecutive days, the Database service will stop the database automatically. If this happens, restart the database and continue using it. If your Always Free Autonomous Database remains in a stopped state for 3 consecutive months, the database will be reclaimed (automatically terminated) by the Database service.
I also did not exceed the storage limit on the free tier; I'm sure I had less than 1 GB data in APEX, and did not use it for anything else (free limit is 20GB).
So I don't know what happened here, and only Oracle personnel can fix this and I can't find a way to contact them. Hopefully my prototype application was not lost.
If this is not the right place to ask for help, please let me know where, because as a free-tier account I do not get to open tickets with Oracle directly and I don't know where else to ask. I understand that paying customers should get priority, but I feel that everyone should be able to notify the vendor when a database on their cloud inexplicably goes down.
Thanks!