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.

  • @[email protected]English
    76•7 months ago

    That Cloudflare were justifiably unhappy with the situation and wanted to take action is fine.

    What’s not fine is how they approached that problem.

    In my opinion, the right thing for Cloudflare to do would have been to have an open and honest conversation and set clear expectations and dates.

    Example:

    "We have recently conducted a review of your account and found your usage pattern far exceeds the expected levels for your plan. This usage is not sustainable for us, and to continue to provide you with service we must move you to plan x at a cost of y.

    If no agreement is reached by [date x] your service will be suspended on [date y]."

    Clear deadlines and clear expectations. Doesn’t that sound a lot better than giving someone the run-around, and then childishly pulling the plug when a competitor’s name is mentioned?

    • @[email protected]English
      56•7 months ago

      Considering the perspective of the poster, the misleading title, etc - are you actually sure they didn’t?

      • @QuaternionsRockEnglish
        4•7 months ago

        Until Cloudflare responds to the post, it is IMO most beneficial to assume that the OP is being truthful and forthright. Doing so puts pressure on Cloudflare to either clarify or rectify the situation, whereas treating Cloudflare as though they are above suspicion accomplishes nothing.

        After all, OP is very much the little guy here.

        • @[email protected]English
          9•7 months ago

          Eh, I have a couple of issues with that. For one, I doubt CF would even respond to this. I could easily see them using this very writeup to sue, with all the admissions in it.

          The bigger part though, is calling an online casino, whose own IT team (the writer) admitted they were knowingly abusing the plan they were on, the “little guy”.

          Are they small in comparison to Cloudflare? Absolutely, those schmucks have way too much control of the internet. Calling an online casino, whose own staff lied in the title, the little guy though… Doesn’t sit right with me.

          No, I’m not going to side with them, or with CF. I’m going to make my assumptions off what I know (two terrible companies, one of which has a liar writing an article where they pretend to not have admittted to their own lies about the subject), and I’m going to assume this:

          • Terrible casino used a plan they know they shouldn’t have been on.
          • Terrible casino would have known what their traffic looked like for a long time.
          • Awful CF noticed, and said “Hey guys, wrong plan, talk to sales.”
          • Terrible casino threatened to just leave awfuo CF.
          • Awful CF demands a year up front to ensure their costs are covered for previous abuse of the TOS.
          • Awful CF figures “screw it, they are stringing us along, just cut them off so we don’t spend more money. TOS violation makes it easy.”
          • Idiot IT from terrible online casino writes an article (stupidly) in which they admit to TOS violations, and pretends not to know about their own traffic from a resource they are relying on.

          Seems pretty obvious to me. Barring further details, my assumptions are based on what I know, and I am perfectly happy sticking to that.

          You do you.

    • @[email protected]English
      20•7 months ago

      From the additional info I read, it sounds more like the traffic wasn’t the main issue.

      Gambling is forbidden in a lot of countries or heavily regulated. Cloudflare uses a common IP pool for all customers, so a casino customer would possibly get their IPs blacklisted (by various ISPs). The Enterprise tier of Cloudflare has “Bring your own IP (ByoIP)”, which they probably wanted to force onto this problematic customer to protect their business.

      So it’s actually a problem, not just them paying not enough (which is another reason to get rid of them as fast as possible).

    • @gorgoriEnglish
      2•7 months ago

      That would have been a mature thing to do.