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.

  • @CryophiliaEnglish
    39•6 months ago

    The first communications were intentionally misleading though. CF wasn’t trying to solve a problem, they were trying to sell a service. If CF had just led with “upgrade or we nuke your site” then that’s scummy, but fair. Leading these guys on about technical problems and “trust & safety” bullshit was not fair at all.

    • @[email protected]English
      17•6 months ago

      Is that the first communication though? I would really like to hear Cloudflare’s side of the story.

    • @[email protected]English
      11•6 months ago

      There were 3 issues at once, so “trust & safety” is definitely part of it.

      1. Too much traffic use, this is purely a billing issue and CF probably wouldn’t even care (they haven’t for years) despite losing money
      2. Violating ToS with the domains, a minor infraction probably, but enough to cancel the contract
      3. This is the big one: CF uses one pool of IPs for all customers, the IP of a gambling site (like a casino) will get banned by ISPs of various countries (Gambling being illegal, strictly regulated and so on). This is the trust & safety issue, CF is actively hurting by keeping this customer. The enterprise plan they want to push them to has ByoIP (Bring your own IP), which would probably have been one condition of keeping them on. CF could have communicated better (if we got the full story here…), but for $250 a month they’d much rather kick the customer off their service
      • @CryophiliaEnglish
        -4•6 months ago

        So maybe fucking say that?

    • @RandelungEnglish
      4•6 months ago

      And understandably you wouldn’t switch plans if all you’re talking to is sales without context.