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.

  • @realbadatEnglish
    9•1 month 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.