Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h
robindev.substack.com
TL;DR: We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains. While this escalated up our business we had 3 sales calls with them, trying to figure out what was happening and how to reach a reasonable contract in a week. When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains, causing huge downtime in our core business, sleepless nights migrating away from CF, irreparable loss in customer trust and weeks of ongoing downtime in our internal systems.

Also, interesting comment I found on HackerNews (HN):

This post was definitely demoted by HN. It stayed in the first position for less than 5 minutes and, as it quickly gathered upvotes, it jumped straight into 24th and quickly fell off the first page as it got 200 or so more points in less than an hour.

I’m 80% confident HN tried to hide this link. It’s the fastest downhill I’ve noticed on here, and I’ve been lurking and commenting for longer than 10 years.

  • @solrizeEnglish
    140•6 months ago

    HN thread is here and it’s on the front page 7 hours old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808

    Many mentions made that a significant part of the issue seemed to be Cloudflare IP addresses getting banned in some countries. They wanted the customer to switch to a bring-your-own-IP plan.

    Also, the discussion took place over 1 month, not 24 hours.

    I think the HN thread is reasonably informative and nuanced. CF didn’t do great but it was somewhat a fog of war situation.

    • @[email protected]English
      58•6 months ago

      Yeah this substac just reads as we abused cloudflare then were surprised they didn’t take us saying no well.