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.

  • VantaBrandon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    The tl;dr seems to be this was a money losing account for Cloudflare, and they couldn’t squeeze them so they weaseled out with some TOS violation to prevent losing money on what was promised to be unlimited traffic, they have better lawyers so they’re not worried.

    Cloudflare 100% in the wrong here, they are closing accounts for TOS violations when they are just unprofitable, I would very strongly consider how tightly to couple with them knowing how cavalier they are about squashing small businesses.

    If enough of these happen though, they’ll get destroyed by a class action lawsuit, and they’d deserve every bit of it

    • daq@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      CF doesn’t give a fuck about 80tb of traffic. These guys were in severe TOS violation that could affect all CF customers if CF IPs got blocked. Given 48 hours to bring their own IPs and switch to (expensive AF anywhere) enterprise account and finally shut down TWO WEEKS later after trying to weasel their way out of this instead of accepting they need to pay to play this stupid game.

      We’ve been CF customers forever and enshitification is definitely affecting all of their services and mostly customer support, but in this instance I’m 100% on the side of CF.

      • merc@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        1 month 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.

        • SquiffSquiff@lemmy.world
          English
          0·
          1 month 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.

          • merc@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            0·
            26 days 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.