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
    45•6 months ago

    I’m 100% on the side of CF.

    100%?

    We scheduled a call with their “Business Development” department. Turns out the meeting was with their Sales team,

    …

    So we scheduled another call, now with their “Trust and Safety” team. But it turns out, we were actually talking to Sales again.

    This is the part that’s ridiculous to me. If CloudFlare thinks they’re violating TOS that’s fine. If they’re willing to let them continue with their business as-is as long as they pay more? That’s fine. But, scheduling calls with one group and it turns out it’s actually CloudFlare’s sales team on the phone, that’s ridiculous.

    • @[email protected]English
      23•6 months ago

      Well, the way he describes it does sound messed up, but if the only solution CF is willing to accept is for them to bring their own IPs and that is only available with an enterprise plan, what kind of conversation were they expecting? And like I said in another thread, enshitification at CF affected their customer service the most. We went from being able to to speak directly to devs, to people who actually understood the problem, to first tier support that didn’t understand shit to 0 tier support that barely understands English.

    • @SquiffSquiffEnglish
      18•6 months ago

      It seems that you’ve misunderstood what the issue is here from cloudflare’s perspective. The customer was using cloudflare IP addresses, which is causing a knock-on effect for the rest of cloudflare’s customers and putting cloudflare as a business themselves at risk. The alternative was for the customer to use their own IP addresses as cloudflare advised . I’m not sure what you think ‘Business development’ teams do but I certainly wouldn’t be expecting engineering advice from them.

      • @[email protected]English
        0•5 months ago

        The customer was using cloudflare IP addresses, which is causing a knock-on effect for the rest of cloudflare’s customers and putting cloudflare as a business themselves at risk.

        Right, so sales should not be involved in any way.

        The alternative was for the customer to use their own IP addresses as cloudflare advised .

        Again, sales should not have been involved in any way.

        I’m not sure what you think ‘Business development’ teams do but I certainly wouldn’t be expecting engineering advice from them.

        They are at least not identical to sales. They work with sales, but there’s at least some engineering component of the job. In this case if you were told you were meeting with the business development team, you’d expect that there would be talk about an engineering solution to the problem. Not just paying cloudflare more money.