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.

  • RickRussell_CAEnglish
    16•4 months ago

    First of all, congrats! Your business must have become pretty successful. How exactly did CF decide to “ask” you to switch to Enterprise?

    Maybe…

    * You violated their terms of service…

    I wouldn’t say Cloudflare is innocent, here, but this business handled Cloudflare the cudgel that was used to beat them. They admit to doing something with their domains that was expressly prohibited in the service they were paying for.

    • @TraeEnglish
      10•4 months ago

      Then they offered to resolve it in whatever way CF deemed appropriate and CF refused to elaborate exactly which domains were the issue.

      • RickRussell_CAEnglish
        1•4 months ago

        resolve it in whatever way CF deemed appropriate

        CloudFlare deemed the upgrade to Enterprise service appropriate.